The Present of Story Time: Ring Composition, Layered Chiasms, and the "Now" of Reading

 

Intro

This post is connected to my post on narrative as "story time," but there was a temptation to call it "Time and Narrative" in honor of Paul Ricoeur, whose work I have found immensely insightful. (I did one of my PhD comp questions on his Rule of Metaphor, but I also picked a few things up from his three-volume Time and Narrative for that question ... very tempting). But I wouldn't want people finding this post to think I am actually pulling in material from Ricoeur when I'm not doing so in this post, and thus be frustrated. There are lots and lots and lots of good things in Ricoeur's work, but I'm not appealing to any of them in this post (outside of a momentary allusion in a parentheses).

I'm also not going into specifics from any one work like Harry Potter, or at least I am not building an argument from and about them (although I may throw in an example or nice illustration allusion here or there). Rather, this is a more purely theoretical post trying to process the place of such studies as chiasm and ring composition within the whole human project of reading and interpreting stories.

So, as noted, this is a sort of development of the concept of time as a key category for understanding narrative/literature/story. The impetus for actually pulling a post together came from watching Dr Strange (review post here), but the cluster of issues and thoughts have been marinating in my brain for a while, or my brain has been marinating in them ... not sure which. But I've been dwelling on it even more than usual since writing my post on a dual-layerchiastic reading of the Harry Potter series. (I should also note that I am not bringing in any material on time from Dr Strange, where it is really used mainly only as a mechanism to facilitate plot action; it’s more just that the use of it got my mind spinning on time).

I'm interested in the difference between the base structure of a ring composition/chiasm and what happens when an author begins to adapt it in multi-layered structures, so I am going to be looking at those things as two separate things and referring to one as past and one as future (which will be kind of tricky)

Primer on Time

Some might call what I am about to give a philosophy of time, but it is probably better termed a theology of time. For one, in recent times, philosophy of time has (at least the last I was looking into it) gone in the direction of time as a fourth dimension and identity extended through time as a problem for materialist philosophy (thinkers such as J. J. Smart and Hermann Minkowski, the latter of whom had a character in Lost named for him), and so calling it a theology avoids possible confusion. Of course, the main thinker I will mention, Augustine, is studied in philosophy as well as theology. But his philosophical thinking is always in service of at least a stated endeavor of theology, of thinking and talking about God. What I am doing with it is not directly theological as it applies to literature, but I do think it can be fit into my thoughts on Incarnational imagination (with the capital “I” … but it will probably take me a while to pin down even the basic connections), and I do appeal below at points to the theological aspects of it to explicate the philosophical dimension of the exposition of literature.

  

Augustine dwells most on time as triadic—past, present, and future—and this is in the service of one of the two things for which he is most well known, his thinking on the Trinity (the other is his thought on “grace”). This, again, as I have spoken of in my post on the film Interstellar, has to do, for Augustine, with what are known as his “psychological models” of the Trinity, explicating the Trinity through examining triadic elements in human experience (e.g., the lover, the beloved, and the love between them), since humanity is made in the “image” of God (I should say explicating to what degree that is possible, as Augustine, along with the Church, admits that the Trinity is a mystery that we cannot fully understand).

Hopefully the triadic structure of time will have some chiastic applications too, but that will be further work than what I do here.

The key is that the present always contains the future and the past. The present is really the only of the three that can be actually examined. We tend to think of the past as the observable one, but all we really have is the evidence about the past before us in the present . The future obviously cannot be examined, but the thing about it that can be examined in the present is “expectation.” The connection of the present with theology is that eternity is thought of as an ever present “now.” I can’t get into it too much here, but one way that the triadic structure of time in human experience mirrors the mystery of the eternal in the Trinity is that the present is also (paradoxically with what I just said) the one place that is least observable because it can’t be located. As soon as you turn to look at it, it is in the past and the new “present” is actually the future of the one in which you undertook the project of looking at the present. Time is truly fleeting.

Past, present, and future are, for this way of thinking, really three aspects of the same thing, which is the present (not to get to “zen” about it, which is to say pretentiously “mystical”). My point right now is to detail the key aspect of past and future that play into this threefold understanding of the present. The easier of the two to describe is the future, which can be summed up in the word I just used above, “expectation” (and, in post on a blog that spends so much time on Harry Potter, but wanting to stay on target with this broader theoretical exposition, I have to resist the temptation to go off on tying in expecto patronum). The present contains our hopes and aspirations, our expectations. And the expectation it contains most, or rather, more deeply than any other, is the expectation of who we will become. This comes from the fact that the “who” we are is the focus of the past too.

The past is "memory" in the ancient sense of the word, which is a "sense of self," the Latin concept of memoria. I have to admit that I would have to track down the sourcework on this ... I am taking it from a comment by Dr Scott Hahn in a class lecture, or rather from my memory of that statement some 12 to 14 years ago (I could probably track down the class notes eventually, but that would be some major archeology in my bins of grad school class notes tucked away in the basement). We could not think of who we are at this moment without remembering how we came to be here at this place and this time as who we are (I’m a huge fan of the English band Elbow, and am reminded here of a line in their song “Open Arms”: “The man you are will know the boy you were”). However, being here as the person who developed in coming here always involves ideas of the things I expected while undergoing the that development, and so the future is even in the past. And the present is in both: you have always been (past) in the midst (present) of what you are on your way to doing, becoming who you expect to become (future).

If the past is memoria, the sense of self, and the future is expectation, then the present is simply the act of being. I don’t want to drag in too much other philosophical sourcework, but the big concept for the post-modern philosopher Martin Heidegger (one of the main father’s of phenomenology), the term by which he expressed his root concept of human experience, is the German term dasein, which literally means “being there,” and possibly his most well known and most seminal work was called Sein und Zeit, Being and Time (and this is in a different way of talking about time than the contemporary materialist philosophers who talk about time as a fourth dimension, who, from what I recall, are largely from the other major strand of contemporary philosophy, the analytical, not from the continental phenomenological tradition … for instance, Minkowski was a mathematician).

(Important Note: I would note here, for anyone wanting to go further in the exploration of post-modern philosophy, that Heidegger is a sticky character: not only do many on the conservative side lay most of the woes of contemporary thinking, particularly in Europe, at his feet, but he is also sticky because of his involvement in the National Socialist Party in Nazi Germany and the fact that some of his most central philosophical terms have pre-histories of use in the ideology of that movement—I do not think this makes his thought unusable, and indeed, I think it very profound in some ways, but it does mean you have to be careful and wear your dragon-hide gloves, which is why I would not want to bring him up here without giving this warning).

As regards a primer on theology/philosophy of time, this is, as those UK people in Harry Potter are fond of putting it, enough to be getting on with. But I would note here for the reader a point of my method in what follows: since the key idea is that the present always contains the past and the future, my tendency in what follows will be to give the past and future elements and then show their melding in the present element.

The Time of the Story

The realm of this post is a continuation of thoughts on “story time,” or narratives in relation to time, and the connection of that with the study of historical ring composition and the possibilities of things like layered chiasms in any present work we’re examining. And just as I labeled past, present, and future each with one aspect in the primer on time (past as memoria/sense of self, future as expectation, and present as the simple act of being here and now in the flow of past into future), I am now going to label the three times with three moments of chiastic construction. But this gets tricky.

It is tricky because I am NOT going to say that the present is the layered chiasm of the story in front of us (in the present … and, believe me, I know that can be frustrating). In fact, fitting with the whole “mystery of time” thing and the fleeting nature of the present, the present is the one thing I am not going to label ring composition and layered chiasms as anywhere in this post. In this section, I am going to label it as the future, and in the next (the time of the reader), I am going to label it as the past.

The past of chiasm are those chiasms/ring that have gone in the past, especially in the great works of the Western canon, which Dr John Granger is much more adept at studying than am I because his knowledge of the canon has so much more breadth and depth. The future builds on top of the past by taking that basic structure and doing new things with it, like layering it in new and distinctive ways.

The flow between those two is obviously the moment of the composition of the story by the author. I hesitate to bring in the author because of the debate that rages in post-modern thought about the “author” as a spectre, as a phantasm, and the claim that all there really is is the text. And, indeed, I do agree with something like the school known as “new criticism” at least in their warning of “beware the fallacy of authorial intent,” which means that you should not assume that because something is not stated by the author as intentional it is not there in the text.

(Note: It also means that a statement of authorial intent cannot, in a deus ex machine way, insert a meaning into the text after they have composed it in a finished form, particularly a public finished form like publication, if they did not get it solidly in the text when they composed it … I’m not going to get into this here, but this does come into play, in my opinion, in the debate over whether or not the Dumbledore of the actual Harry Potter text is gay, and I would note here that a gay rights activist, John Cloud, came out with an op-ed piece in Time the week after [10/25/2007] JKR’s famous Radio City Music Hall interview statement saying, in so many words that, from his perspective, while the support is welcomed, it would have been better if she had actually written him gay … which pretty much means that Cloud, a gay rights activist, thinks she didn’t—it may have been her authorial intention, but it wasn’t her compositional achievement).

The real “present” under this heading is the time of the story itself, what I have called in my first post on “Story Time” the “kairotic chronology” of the story. But the author is the most visible element of the presenting of that story, and contra a radical reader-response method of interpretation, I have to agree that the actual individual author plays a central role.

As a lead in to the next section on the “time of the reader,” I would note that, at least in some theories, and the ones with which I agree, the author is really the first reader. What the author reads is the story as it presents itself to them in their imagination. That is why the author’s use of chiasm (and multi-layered chiasms) in interpreting that story as it presents itself to them is the future, and they have a truly wonderful role in that they do this interpretation not by discursive discussion, as secondary, derivative writers like me, but by actively creating a narrative, what Tolkien would call “sub-creation.” Especially for an author who seems as demonstrably versed in ring composition as JKR, it is definitely the “past” as the history and presence of ring composition in Western literature that is flowing, through them, into the future, the chiastic structures of the story they produce on the page.

The Time of the Reader

So we turn to the reader, and this section cannot be really complete until the next, but we will get to that … all in good time. For here, the construction of the story in layered chiasms is now the past. The future is, I would say, the application of the meaning to their own life that the reader is going to do, whether it be a moral they discover that they think they should follow or an insight they discover that helps them to interpret events in their own life.  

(Side note: There is so much I could get into here that I have to pass by with only a brief allusion, such as Paul Ricoeur’s thesis of “threefold mimesis” in his three-volume Time and Narrative, the claim that “art imitates life” only because “life” first imitates art: we interpret our experience, the meaning of it [what “life” is], through the categories and insights that we are shown in the stories we hear in our formative years … but time presses on and I must pass by, miles to go and that sort of thing).

I would say that the “present” is (and this is perhaps my most central thesis) the time right after the completion of reading the story, that point when the reader is assimilating it and taking the first step into really understanding it. That moment may have had attempts at divination that predicted it, more successfully or less successfully, but the real “present” is the assimilation by the reader upon finishing the story (just as the author as first reader assimilated the idea/s of the story as it presented itself to them in their “present” of actually constructing that story, leasing to the “future” of actual chiasm/ring in their finished story).

Psychology: 

Dream Think and the World Soul

Some of this is in answer to a question that was posed to Dr John Granger by one of his readers concerning whether ring composition is really what holds our attention, because it doesn’t seem (If I am remembering that interchange correctly) like something so complicated—it seems to require a rather intricate knowledge and tracking of elements and coordinating that with the model idea of chiasms—could hold us on a first reading. And, to be honest, as one who works in it, it does seem rather esoteric. So, this requires an answer.

One difficulty, especially as concerns claiming that the ring composition schema known from the Western canon, is that a modern composition by a modern author that is read by a modern reader has a somewhat different life than the earliest works in the Westerm canon, ancient texts that always functioned on chiasm. Those were materials that had a pre-existence and a precirculation, meaning they were often being either read or heard (in oral recitation cultures) before they were included in any kind of singular narrative that resembles what we have: various strands of oral traditions about the gods and about the Trojan war existed before Hesiod and Homer were ever born, let alone composed works, and it was from these sources that they worked in composing their works.

Especially in oral tradition cultures and stages, as they passed things around in informal settings, they used what worked for organization and collective memory, which means it had to “hook.” But this collective need for methods of better memorization, like ring compositions, is not in play with a modern author (although, as I said, knowledge of the products of those ancient compositions and the fact that they were chiastically constructed can form part of the author’s mechanism in writing a story if they are well versed and studied in that tradition, as JKR very well may have been as a classics major at Exeter).

But I would also argue, with Dr Granger, that there is something timeless about chiasm/ring that hooks for us because we are hardwired for it, not just that it is in the tradition and that the occasional modern author might use these archaic forms that can be rather esoteric, especially in modern times. My point here, however, will not be to examine the concrete details of that hardwiring from a psychological standpoint (although I think it could be done: chiasms X flow as descent and re-assent hooking into primal experience or things along that line). Rather, I want to look at the “present” of the reader, the moment of assimilation by the reader right after finishing the story, from the psychological standpoint of how they assimilate, the action that is actually going on rather than the correspondences between psyche and chiasm/ring that make it possible.

My basic set up for this is to compare it to the recording and interpretation of dreams, a standard method in talk-therapy. I have related that issue in more detail in my post on the 2010 film “Inception,” but I will give the basic rubric here again. In my personal experience the best way to remember and analyze dreams is to write them down the minute you are awake. And it seems to me that the reason for this is that, at that moment, the part of your brain that constructed those dreams, Freud’s “unconscious,” is closer to the surface and is really still functioning. I call it “dream think” because you are officially awake and exercising conscious thought but you are also still dreaming, in a certain way: that “unconscious” of your mind is still working, fleshing out the associations it was doing while you were asleep (post-modernism makes this claim about all memory, and I think there is a point to that, but also that it gets taken too far sometimes, and I want to stay focused on the issue of dreaming in relation to reading of narrative texts).

To bring in another seminal figure from the development of psychology and try to tie his thought into what I have said above about the earliest literature in the Western canon, Carl Jung, the other great father of psychology, dwelt much more on mythology than did Freud, and he connected it with what he called the “collective unconscious” (I believe he also called it the “world soul” or “world self,” but that is relying, as is my whole use of Jung here, on the memory of one discussion group meeting with a group of literature and philosophy grad students at Fordham University years ago … people can correct me, but for here, I am going with what I remember, and I think that it is sufficient for the limited scope of what I am doing here … but I am open to criticism as long as it is informed). Thus, just as the individual unconscious (Freud preferred “unconscious” to “subconscious”) writes dreams, the collective unconscious of the race writes mythologies using chiasm/ring composition. And I believe that, just as the prime time for recording and getting the material for basic analysis of dreams is just upon waking, so the “present” in which the reader grapples with the story is that moment of “waking” just after reading the story.

I think that the hook and hardwire of chiastic reading is in that collective unconscious of the race (but as I said, I am not here getting into concrete details of possible mental structures that mirror chiastic/ring movement). My Hebrew professor said of the authors of the Old Testament, when I asked if a piece we had just read was chiastic, that they had “chiasm on the brain. And think that, especially when an author has written with “chiasm/ring on the brain” (as Dr Granger and I argue JKR has), it hooks up in that “present time” (just after reading, say, one of the Harry Potter books) with the same thing in the mind that ancient cultures recognized as so apt about chiasm/ring for organizing those myths and legends for collective preservation and transmission.

The Importance of Face Time

But the hook just mentioned in the previous section happens after reading the story. So, what hooks the reader at the beginning and keeps them going to that “present” immediately after reading the whole? As I basically argue in my post on “The Importance of Cocoa” (in Fantastic Beasts), I think it is the characters, what I call the “face/skin” level, for instance, meeting Newt, Jacob, Tina, and Queenie in Fantastic Beasts and its payoff in the endearing scenes in which the couples say goodbye to each other, at least for now (and a hopeful hello again for Queenie and Jacob). In Harry Potter, it is an interesting kid who, in spite of the oppression he has suffered, can come up with the line “Harry always said Dudley looked like a pig in a wig, or a man the physical size of Hagrid but also with a heart the size of his, or a boy who recognizes a friend in another boy on a train who is self-conscious about the fact that his mother always forgets that he hates corn beef.

Story Time Closer and the Incarnational Imagination:

I think I said above that I would not be able to get into how this all intersects with my first post on “Story Time,” but I will mention one brief and broad aspect here in closing. Chronos is the past and the future, and in it, the present is as fleeting as described above in the primer on time. But Kairos is the present, the place where we are in our reading of the story.

I will also add, despite any disclaimers above saying I would not have time for this, that in an Incarnational imagination, the “present” of that intrusion of kairos into chromos is the place where the quasi-eternal “present,” the “timeless now,” incarnates the those themes that are larger than the individual human but give meaning to that individual. In the “Hebrew Myth Become Christian Gospel,” to borrow and adapt the title of Thomas Fawcett’s work on the Christian New Testament, it comes from the actual Incarnation of the second person of that Trinity that Augustine spent so much time pondering and is the “hour” when comes the Son of Man, that ultimate human individual.