Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative – Jane Alison

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.

Enduring Enduring Love

Enduring Love has a justly famous opening, bringing together a group of strangers as they attempt in vain to avert a hot air balloon catastrophe in the English countryside. It then shifts focus to become a strange book about the obsessive relationship between a young religious gay man, Jed Parry, and our narrator, Joe Rose, middle-aged and married (to a woman, Clarissa). I had read McEwan’s Atonement before, so I was on the lookout for narrative games, and was convinced I had spotted a twist only to discover that there was no twist after all.

The problem with the book is that it seems rather disorganised. With a title mentioning love you have a razor-sharp thematic focus right from the beginning, and love is complex enough that it can sustain the lengthiest of works. (Including a different Clarissa, in fact.) Enduring Love, however, is not a long work. Yet it seems burdened by its title, forced into discussing love, and forced by the thought of love’s range into talking about all too much. It’s wide in scope, rather than deep. Love is one word, but it can take many forms, each of which is rich enough for a story.

Instead, speaking broadly, we have: the romantic love of Joe for Clarissa and vice versa, the obsessive love of Jed for Joe, Jed’s love of God, Joe’s love of science, Clarissa’s love for Keats, the love of the widow of one of the men who tried to stop the balloon for her husband, who nevertheless she suspects had cheated on him, the love of a trio of drug addicts for one another, reflections on the love of parents for children, and so on.

In other words, there is too much here. The main focus, Jed’s obsession for Joe (and its contrast to Joe’s relationship with Clarissa), is not given enough development despite being the dominant part of the book. The tonics, questions of moral responsibility associated with the hot air balloon catastrophe (is Joe to blame for the victim’s death?), and the contrast of reason (science) and emotions (God, faith), are too faintly drawn.

Then there is the matter of the plot. Enduring Love is a book where things actually happen. But it is also a painfully real novel. It is the most upper-middle-class English story I have ever read. It’s just about people who have nice picnics with things from Waitrose or occasionally Fortnum and Mason, who have nice houses and nice friends. The upper middle class. My people, (by birth and education, if not always by inclination). So, when we have attempted assassinations by hired killers in busy restaurants, or calling up old friends to help us buy handguns from drug dealers, there’s something that seems more laughable than congruent. The opening scene is unlikely yet believable, the rest is just silly. (And as the action is being driven by characters, we can hardly say this fits into the whole ordered universe vs randomness theme, either).

There’s a fundamental tension in modern middle-class life, it seems to me, which causes problems for novelists. In the good old days, love plots were typically structured as being against society, and brought readers on side by the truth of the love against society’s fakeness. Now, with scant exception, we can love who we want, and though we may occasionally face some disapproval, in western Europe for the dominant social groupings we cannot create nearly enough drama to make a story. Instead, the novelist of average talent or below who wants to write about passionate love and make a story of it, is practically obliged to write about something like obsession.

Obsession, however, places the lover outside of society. It’s inherently less interesting because it reflects little back on our world. Its lessons stop as soon as we think about what makes obsession happen, patting ourselves on the back at the obvious conclusion that, for the example, we must be an atomised society to cause such madness in its members. In Enduring Love, Jed is not integrated in society. He is a loner, living at home, with no family and no job. Through his obsessiveness, he gradually disintegrates Joe’s position in society, spoiling his marriage and work as he draws him into his “love”. Indeed, Jed even does a good job of disintegrating Joe’s mind.

Now there are thoughts here that are interesting, like the way that Joe’s conviction that Jed is stalking him and dangerous is shared by nobody, so that we see as he falls away from social groups just how fragile our position in society can be. But again, there’s rather too much going on. We don’t need attempted murder to make these points. While I wouldn’t want to stress the point too much, there is a sense for me that in a serious book using shocking action like this is almost like the novelist is saying that they don’t trust themselves to hold my attention otherwise. (Which is probably true of this book).

I felt like Iris Murdoch struggled with a similar problem in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which shares with Enduring Love its focus on people who I went to school with or who my mother occasionally has round for tea. Murdoch’s novel seems at first to be the story of a demonic figure who manipulates a group of friends to ruin their relationships, as if by magic. Using words like “haunted,” “demons”, “materialises”, Murdoch creates an atmosphere or uneasy horror in spite of an essentially extremely bougie London setting. Yet when the time comes to have consequential action, those moments that would prove that the demon were truly a hellish visitant, Murdoch refuses to allow anything like that before finally dismissing the mystery at the story’s close. Meanwhile, McEwan rushes to jump the proverbial shark. Neither approach is entirely satisfactory. The one brings in the unreal and surrenders to the real. The other seems real, but refuses to abide by reality’s rules.

In general, I suppose I just find my people boring. I try to be a well-behaved writer and pay attention, but so far as I am aware there has been not one interesting story taking place around me in that circle in all the years of my life. (My time in Russia is another story). No cheating, no problems which are not immediately thrown under the rug, pure bourgeois stability, punctuated occasionally by death or mental decline, complaining over inheritance, but nothing more than that. That’s not to say I cannot write stories from the material I’m given. But the stuff of old novels, society scandal and the like, is essentially absent. The problem, one of them anyway, is that in Enduring Love McEwan doesn’t seem to trust either himself or his readers. The novel could work just as well as a slow burn, a gradual breakdown in sanity, a growing sense of menace. Instead, McEwan feels the need here to have every chapter be dramatic like a cheap thriller, to show love from so many angles, so that it’s far too busy a work to be an interesting one.

That’s not to say that there are not things I admired in the work. One part I liked is the novel’s ending, not what it says so much as how it says it. As with Lolita, where if we want to know Lo’s true fate we must read the parts where Humbert Humbert’s narration stops rather carefully, here too we have an appendix that gives more closure to everyone’s story than the section of Joe’s narrative does, while concealing its actual significance under the appearance of an article in a medical journal.

There is also the hard-to-dismiss fact that the book does work hard to establish tension, and as novelists are supposed to make their works entertaining, this is a good place to learn it. The first chapter is not that dull conversation business that animates the start of War and Peace, for example. (/s) Here, it’s pure energy, suggesting that we needn’t care about characters if the story is exciting enough. And as for that beginning, it’s also a good example of a way to draw out a morally complex theme from a conceivable real-world situation. It’s just that McEwan, for mysterious reasons, chooses to leave this theme in the background rather than the foreground.

Overall, your blogger shrugs his shoulders. I felt this was a busy book, with uninteresting characters and a silly plot. It was a contemporary story – I could tell at once how much the work was written under the sensible eyes (and scalpel) of a sensible editor, or even the ghost of one, tutting at the thought of an opening that did not grip, of anything that might lose the reader’s attention and do something so irrelevant as add depth to themes. Yet unlike the contemporary fiction of people like Sally Rooney or Patricia Lockwood, where even if I have my complaints I still am excited by the opportunities for reflecting our changed relation with the world under the effects of an ever more pervasive technology, I did not feel McEwan wrote a book that was contemporary in the deeper sense of telling me something about my world which I did not already know. (A classic, of course, can be a thousand years old and still manage this). Enduring Love, instead, feels already dated. Or, to be blunt, it’s a book which apart its opening, will probably not endure.

Blog note: the recent paucity of blog posts is due to two factors. First, my bag, containing my laptop and other quite useful items like the heavily annotated books I was aiming to write about (apologies to the reader who recommended Cusk – both Transit and Kudos are gone but there might still be a post on Outline), was stolen on the train. Second, I was struck by inspiration and wrote the first draft of a novel in the past two months, some 110000 words. This necessarily has to take precedence over other forms of writing, and indeed living.

Anyway, should be back to slightly more regularly updates from now ish.

W.G. Sebald’s leftovers – Campo Santo

As a reader, W.G. Sebald seems to have loved what is marginal and passed over. It only seems fair then, that after his death in a road accident in late 2001 we should be able to peruse his own marginal works and see what light they throw upon his major ones. Campo Santo is a collection of essays and prose pieces, of which the latter are far more interesting than the former. Snarky readers who know Sebald already may ask what the difference between an essay and “prose” is for Sebald, given that his “fiction” is already strangely essayistic and impressionistic, akin to very wise travelogues. The answer that comes out here is that in the prose the narrator is in the world, instead of merely contemplating it. In other words, he has legs.

Composed between The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, and which may had Sebald lived longer have come together as another book close to the former in approach, but which instead bob like buoys, disconnected and out at sea, the four prose pieces set in Corsica are the best part of Campo Santo. I read them not only because I now love Sebald, but also because I wanted to see whether perhaps in these pieces the carefully constructed machinery underlying his novels might be more visible. Sebald is one of those writers whose prose seems deceptively simple, thoughtless even, and it was only with equal care and attention that I could shake that impression when I first read him.

Sebald is all about mood. He describes a world we recognise as our own while somehow making it sinister, unnerving, uncanny and tinted with melancholy. “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” is a case in point. This, the first of the prose pieces, begins with the kind of sentence that makes you do a double take, so far from Sebald’s towering reputation does it seem:

In September last year, during a two-week holiday on the island of Corsica, I took a blue bus one day down the west coast to Ajaccio to spend a little time looking around the town, of which I knew nothing except that it was the birthplace of the Emperor Napoleon.

Certainly, there’s a sense of potential mystery – what will this town hold – but the main word I’d use to describe this sentence is “banal”. I could write it or its like. Here you go:

“In the beginning of May, taking advantage of the generous German public holidays that month and feeling a certain unease at the thought of another weekend spent at my new home in the Ruhr region, I took two trains and a ferry north to the island of Norderney, of which I knew nothing other than that it was where the poet Heine had composed his cycle of prose and poems “Die Nordsee”.”

If we hoped that the “something more” would come at once from Sebald, we are disappointed by the information in the subsequent sentence that it “it was a beautiful, sunlit day”, and a description of the palms swaying. Our first sense of something possibly being off is “a snow-white cruise ship” which looks “like a great iceberg”. Here, at last, do we have something out of place – an iceberg in Corsica. It’s not startling by any stretch, but it is odd enough that we might notice the image half-consciously. “Dark, tunnel-like entrances” to houses, the houses themselves like “citadels”, give further images that, especially through their contrast with the charming day, serve that Sebaldian unease.

Sebald works his moods upon us less by shock than by a gradual accumulation of things half-noticed, unimportant in themselves but which by contrast with a safe or sanitised version of reality, the one we ourselves normally perceive, send us off-kilter. Within “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” we have women who seem to look like Napoleon, another one who looks dead while she sits in her chair, and a certain absence of people generally, an emptiness and darkness to contrast with the light, colour, and babble we normally associate with travel.

Unease also comes from the narrator himself, whose voice is decidedly slippery. He starts talking about an image of Napoleon, describing his situation and even his emotions, only to begin the next paragraph with a lurch – “Or so at least we might conclude from an article in Corse-Matin published on the day of my visit”. What we had trusted to be his voice was only his mediation.

We jump from normality to the strange, from voice to voice, but also from time to time. Within this piece alone we go from the present to Kafka in 1911, to Flaubert visiting the same museum as the narrator, to “Mary and Joseph”, and of course to Napoleon himself. If Sebald’s narrators do not live horizontally, in the sense that they struggle to connect to humans around them, they do however live vertically through time, endlessly connecting to past figures and ideas as intimates and friends, or at least frames of reference. This, too, is hardly typical, and encourages the reader to see the world the same way.

Once we are seeing as Sebald did, he can start encouraging us also to share a more specific view, beyond just unease and scepticism of his sources – his pessimism. “The unfathomable misfortune of life” is how he names it here, but other similar phrases are scattered throughout, not so often as to be overwhelming yet unmissably there. One way this is justified is through violence, overt in places, but more often bubbling.

At the end of the first prose piece, a bomb goes off – it is Corsica after all. The second piece talks about burial practices, but also the banditry of Corsica. The third details the devastating effects of hunting and logging on the original ecosystems of the island, and local inhabitants’ inability to connect the consequences to their own actions. Such violence is blatant. Once we start thinking in terms of violence we are able to pick up its more subtle traces, such as in the manias affecting various figures (including at times the narrator himself). Or even, in a description like this:

Before leaving the museum I went down to the basement, where there is a collection of Napoleonic mementos and devotional items on display. It includes objects adorned with the head and initials of Napoleon—letter openers, seals, penknives, and boxes for tobacco and snuff—miniatures of the entire clan and most of their descendants, silhouettes and biscuit medallions, an ostrich egg painted with an Egyptian scene, brightly colored faïence plates, porcelain cups, plaster busts, alabaster figures, a bronze of Bonaparte mounted on a dromedary, and also, beneath a glass dome almost as tall as a man, a moth-eaten uniform tunic cut like a tailcoat, edged with red braid and bearing twelve brass buttons: l’habit d’un colonel des Chasseurs de la Garde, que porta Napoléon Ier (The uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs de la Garde, worn by Napoleon I).

Sebald’s reading, his mood, his drifting gaze, draw us into a way of looking where we cannot read this description of a typical museum’s clutter without seeing in it a certain horror. How did an ostrich egg reach Corsica? Certainly, we might innocently say trade, but in the context of Napoleon it’s much easier, and probably more correct, to say imperialism. Perhaps the “Egyptian scene” is ancient, rather than Napoleonic – it’s much harder to say the same about Napoleon riding a camel. The pointless military adventure to Egypt is not mentioned, but a knowing reader cannot but think of it. The colonel’s uniform is more explicitly related to violence, but like all the others it is something apparently innocuous which, chosen and placed alongside the others in this paragraph, becomes transparent so that we see the blood behind it.

Such a paragraph, such a working of associations, perhaps exemplifies Sebald’s project. Indeed, in one of Campo Santo’s essays there is a telling remark on “my method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life.” That, ultimately, is how Sebald’s prose works. Every comment, or rather cut, whether deep or shallow, obvious or subtle, works to advance his world upon us. And since that prose seems to be both factual, with the vast erudition implied by its author, while also being highly authentic, for here the narrator is in the world and experiencing and sharing it with us, the whole book seems silky and very seductive.

Yet still, once we read the other essays of Campo Santo we might find a certain tension, should we return to the prose pieces. Sebald praises this objective, reporter-like style, saying “the ideal of truth contained in the form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreversible foundation of all literary effort” precisely because it prevents the “human faculty of suppressing any memories that might in some way be an obstacle to the continuance of life”. However, once we see the work that goes into constructing this memory-preserving prose, it’s hard to see it as anything objective anymore. If we still see the narrator as a charming guide to the world, now we see Sebald himself, furiously stabbing at his stone – what we have here is rather extremely subjective, but well masked. And what do we make of the fact that the narrator, though as obsessed with memory as the man who wrote him, remains as silent as the latter on his own past and personal life?

The excitement of Sebald is that he teaches us how to read and look anew upon the world, finding the violence and horror of history behind the slightest of objects. We come away with a greater sense of memory, its passage and the challenges of its conservation. Inevitably though, we must turn that same critical eye back towards the man who made the prose. How far can we trust a man who has such knowledge, yet is so little of the earth itself? We like mysteries, and Sebald himself provides them in his work and also in his person. The recent, in literary terms, scandals (for example here and here) over the biography of Sebald written by Carole Angier and its revelations concerning where Sebald blurred the lines between truth and fiction suggest that these mysteries are unlikely to disappear any time soon.