Defending Chiastic Reading: Music and Body

So, this post comes from further pondering on the questions posed by Dr John Granger's reader that I have mentioned before in my "Story Time 2"  post, the question of whether ring composition/chiasm really explains what grips ups and my admission in that post that it can seem a bit esoteric. Below are two metaphors that have occurred to me that help explain (I hope) what I am talking about as far as the role of chiastic/ring structuring and the level on which it impacts us.

Music

I’m here going appeal to maybe my second-most favorite metaphor for literature—music—and borrow from an author who was known to be a bit down on Harry Potter, but that’s understandable because Harry Potter unseated him as the best selling series in the UK, and I think it’s ok because I think Terry Pratchett’s own writing indicates that he didn’t take himself too seriously … he probably knew that, like everybody, he could be a bit of a crank on some things.

Lord Havelock Vetinari is the patrician of the big city of Ankh Morpork in Pratchett’s discworld series. One of the quirks Vetinari has (and there are many) is that he likes to read a symphony … not hear a symphony … read it. He feels that the hearing of the actual performance itself gets in the way of seeing and appreciating the complex and intricate structure created by the composer. So, he much prefers to simply sit in his office reading the score, rather than actually going to hear the symphony performed by an orchestra.

This is a bit like what chiastic structuring would be on its own, and admittedly, it would grip very few (although it would interest some, particularly those of a more mathematical turn of mind). I would even say that those who are gripped by the score/chiasm alone are not appreciating exactly the same “work” as the person appreciating the symphony as performed by the orchestra. And most of us need to hear the great violin virtuoso like Itzhak Pearlman or Isaac Stern; we need to be gripped by the texture of the performance and the texture of the sounds. We need to actually feel the swell, not just see “crescendo” written on a page.

In terms of stories, I would call this the characters and the allusions to current affairs and themes and all of that good stuff. But I would argue that, just as the violinist and orchestra and conductor would have nothing to perform without the structure of the score, so also themes and the texture of characters would have nothing onto which to latch and in which to adhere for us to encounter them if they did not have the structured movement of the plot. Just as many of us sit down and experience the power of a symphony without being immediately conscious of the artistry of the structure but still need that structure for there to be the powerful performance to experience, so also with the plot structures and the themes and characters in stories: we need structuring like chiasm/ring in order to have the piece of literary art (the difference that makes this easier to see with music than with stories is that the composer and performer are usually different people, especially once the composer is dead). And my next metaphor, body, will argue that we must have it to be satisfied.

But first, as one final argument/explanation from the metaphor of music, I offer the “leading tone 7^th.” The 7^th in a scale always naturally strains toward resolution in the octave (the 8^th), but there is an even further strain possible with a violin called the leading tone 7^th. Because the violin has no frets, a violinist can slightly and gradually roll the fingertip up to bring the note closer and closer to the 8^th, creating amazing tension calling for resolution in the octave—as it was once said by Francis Pittock, the violinist head of the orchestra at Grove City College from whom I got a D in music theory but thoroughly enjoyed taking it, the virtuoso can make the instrument practically cry aching to resolve in the 8^th. Those positions between the 7^th and the 8^th in the scale are not official positions in the structure … BUT without the structure to define them as “in between", they would not be meaningful as such. We need the structure to understand the free spirited imagination as such. In fact, the structure of the scale, the 1^st and 8^th as octave, is what gives even the original 7^th its strain to resolve in the 8^th (and there is actually a movement from the 7^th to the 8th, the very yearning itself to move to the 8th rather go back to the or the 6^th or the 5^th bespeaks a motion in progress, a movement to resolution like the plot of a story).

A Body Walking Down the Street

As seen in my post on dual-layer structuring, I really like the image of the body as a metaphor for literature; I feel it is probably the most apt metaphor for understanding what happens in literature (we even usually talk about certain literature “embodying” certain themes). And I would turn to it once again here. First, though, I’ll say a word about why I like it so much, and that word will segue to my main point of what the metaphor yields for thinking about the import of structure in the narrative or plot of a story.

I have a friend, Carl, who is an artist focusingin “figural” art doing drawing, painting and sculpture. He did his MFA (master of fine arts) at the art institute in lower Manhattan, and he told me that he had an uphill battle getting them to let him focus on figural art, art focused on the human form (rather than modern abstract forms). One of the hurdles they set him, both because it is actually needed for doing figural art and (probably) to make it harder for him to focus on it, was that he had to take a course on human anatomy, an actual hard sciences biology course. The reason is that, if you’re going to do art about the human form well, you need to know how it works: poses into which you will put characters will have to be believable as working with the way the actual human body is set up; the poses have to be natural or at least possible (unless you’re doing a body broken by torture or something).

In fact, I was talking with this friend when he gave a talk at NYU in early 2014 along with a traveling exhibition that included some of his pieces, and he was describing to me a situation in which he had been setting up a sculpture and got the base wrong. I forget if “base” was the word he actually used, but what he as describing was a metal skeleton inside the sculpture. This does not mean a metal version of an actual human skeleton, but rather just a metal structure that provides the support necessary for the material (be it clay, or bronze, etc) in the places it will be needed until the whole thing has set up and cured (and with heavier materials, the support is necessary even beyond curing). But it also has to be congruent with actual physical skeletal structure because it can’t get in the way of the body sculpted on top of it acting and being positioned in a way natural to real human bodies, and it has to actually support the sculpted body in doing so.

Well, my friend had made a mistake in gauging the inner metal structure, and he realized that, if he was going to do the pose he had envisioned on top of the metal structure he had created, the body was going to look unnatural, not the way a human body can be positioned without breaking bones etc. So, while it meant going back to the beginning, his human anatomy course saved him from making a bad piece of figural art.

My whole point in all this description of my friend and his concerns with anatomy in doing sculpture is that he had to know how the human body works. He had to know what was natural to its possible movements and poses. He had to have an accurate sense of it. And I would say that, from our life experience, we all have an unconscious sense of when a body is working in the way natural to it. And using the metaphor of the body for literature, I am going to say that we also have the same kind of unconscious sense of what works for stories.

The basic metaphor example I would use is that of a person walking down the street. Across the history of our lives, we have all seen loads and loads and loads and loads and loads of people walk down a street (or whatever venue you wish … across a room, down stairs, etc). From this, we have a sense of what a body looks like when it is walking well and with no real problems, and this is not necessarily a conscious sense. It may be conscious if we are well studied in anatomy, but even those of us who are not consciously aware of the intricate details of anatomy can tell when something doesn’t look right. Perhaps a limp makes us think a leg bone or muscle may be injured; perhaps walking hunched to one side suggests bruised or cracked ribs; or perhaps dragging the shoulder indicates something wrong there. But the first thing we sense before we start doing such diagnosis is simply that something isn’t right, that something is off. (Perhaps the most common that we would all think of has to do with the brain operating the body: staggering in a certain way = the impairment called “drunk”).

I would argue that we have this same type of unconscious sense when it comes to stories: our life experience with good stories unconsciously tells us when something is off with the story’s bones or muscles etc when we have just watched the story “walk down the street.” The structure is not always chiasm,  but chiasm/ring is among the most prevalent and prominent (Mary Douglas, the cultural anthropologist who is seminal for study of ring composition in her work Thinking In Circles, either in that work or another, discusses her attempt to read, I believe, the book of Numbers as a ring [she actually did a lot of work on Hebrew Bible materials] and admits that somebody could accuse her of seeing ring composition at every turn simply because she wants to see it everywhere, and so she offers the defense that she has analyzed, I believe, the book of Leviticus according to a different classic structuring, which I believe was a “picture poem” … I have the book, but again, digging it out would require excavation that I may try to do soon, but I would like to get this much up for now) .

The main point is that we can discern that one of a few structuring devices have been attempted and that we can sense whether or not it “walked down the street” well. I argue that, after the characters and some of the themes have hooked us and kept us interested long enough to finish reading the book, the unconscious sense recognition of a chiasm/ring done well is what makes it stick with us. The initial hooks also have to do with what Dr John Granger calls our being “hardwired” for chiasm, but even if the main hook was just characters etc, unless we can get a sense that what hooked us there has some well executed structure underneath it, some structured narrative movement (some “grace” in “walking down the street”), the story feels off to us and distinctly not as fulfilling as it could be. Possibly chiasm/ring is the most commonly used of that kind of structure because it is the most natural to us.