I can't write a whole lot on Mary Douglas's Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition beyond unreservedly recommending reading it. It's a seminal work in the field taken from a set of lectures she gave at Yale in2006 or 2007.
By way of introduction, I will simply relate that I actually got around to reading it in full only recently, in preparation for being a guest on a mugglenet podcast on chiasm/ring composition in Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them. And you can be sure that a link to that podcast will be going up on this blog and my Facebook wall and every other place I can think to put it.
These are not really fleshed out thoughts. They're just a few big issues that came to me while reading and then a list (by page number) of smaller instances that caught my eye.
For record, my posts on chiasm are:
Chiasm Basics
Chiasm in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Flesh, Blood, and Bone: Chiastic Bodies
Psychology in Harry Potter: a 3-4-5 chiasm
Clothes on the Chiastic Body in Fantastic Beasts
Music as an Analogy for Chiasm (and the idea of a body walking down the street)
Intersection of "Story Time" and Chiasm (including "Dream Think" theory)
(here is my original post on "Story Time" in Harry Potter [narrative defined as a "kairotic chronology"])
I also have material on chiastic readings of C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength and the 2017 Wonder Woman film.
Layered Chiasm
One of the highlights in this book is the amount of material she has on rings within rings, which is basically where I have gone with layered chiasms ... or at least in the same ballpark. The point that I go further than that is not really one of erudition and knowledge but of imagination, by which I do not mean to say that Douglas has no imagination or something silly like that. It's just that it's a particular imaginative move of mine to use the human body as an image for layered chiasm. I do not know of any ancient theoretical bases for this, meaning any sources ancient, medieval, or modern that have done any connections between human image as a metaphor for literature or stories or art and chiastic structure. I just think that the human body and form always work well as metaphor of what we as humans perceive intellectually (here is a somewhat dour reading of some other works along the line of weak or strong bodies; I should probably lighten up on the tone in places, but the basic substance of panning of Strike and Fury Road).
[I should be clear that, by using "image" and "figure" and like terms in this context, I am not talking about what she describes as a "figure poem," which is when dimensions of a particular image are represented in the structure of a particular work. She provides the figure poem structure as a thing that is completely other than ring and gives a particular example as a way of saying "I'm not just seeing rings everywhere, in which case you could say I might be imagining rings even where they may not be ... here's an example of how I tied another work out to a completely different structure." The example she gives is the book of Leviticus. Leviticus is all about the tabernacle, which has three areas: the outer court, which is separated by a veil from the holy place, which is then further separated by another veil from the holy of holies. And these areas decrease in size as they go. And so the first section of Leviticus, which covers laws applying to the outer court, is the largest. And then comes a brief section of text of a unique type representing the first veil. And then comes the section on the laws pertaining to the holy place, which is smaller that the section with laws on the outer court. And then, after another small "veil" text portion, the smallest section of all covers the laws pertaining to the holy of holies. This type of thing is NOT what I am talking about in speaking of the body as an image of literature: I am not finding big central sections that are a torso and then smaller sections that are a head etc. I'm simply saying that what the human form means to us as humans (meeting a person at the face or purely experiential level and realizing that there is a muscular and then skeletal structure underneath and then seeing the evidence of these in power and motion) bears on how we construct our own human communication, particularly in our literary construction of stories.]
But in going through her exposition on rings within rings (see it as one of her seven rules, on page 37), it may be that my layering them on top of the center (the same center to various rings within the main ring) may be unique to me ... not sure. My "layering" is definitely not the "strung together" type of rings within rings she talks about on p. 37. Mine would probably best be described, in terms of rings, as concentric circles. Even in her consideration of the Iliad, the central ring has demarcated boundaries from the legs (from the beginning coming into the center and going out of the center to the end) of the outer/main ring. Her structures can be accurately represented in a two-dimensional visual, whereas my layering really needs three dimensions. That isn't too say that mine is an advancement beyond what she does, just that it has different dimension, and it is definitely not to say "better" ... or even "good." Those qualitative judgments would be a matter for a further exposition (and may come in with a verdict of "bad" and "worse").
Historical Critical Method and Chiasm
A further point of interest of mine with regard to biblical studies is to read her book How Institutions Think. My interest in this is to see how the creativity of ring composition, which we usually think of as the product of the singular genius of a single author, or at least as occurring in a singular act of composition, might intersect with "trans-personal" or collective authorship (which is what the blurb for the institutions book points to), and particularly spread across an institutional history, to see if this can accommodate ring composition to the conception of source and redaction largely put forward in the Historical Critical Method of biblical study. I won't know if that is productive, though, until I read that book, and even then, it's a formidable intellectual task.
List of Minor Instances
P. 41: I like the guy who says rigid genrification is for novices. This is a sort of pet peeve thing for me. There are those, usually (in my own experience) people who are not actually studied in literary analysis, who like to look down on Harry Potter as below the "genre" of their choice, "adult high fiction" (usually they are fans of Game of Thrones, which I lost interest in about three chapters into the first one and never read further, but from what I can tell, you can get the main, and really only, point of the series in about 2 minutes of watching the dark and doom of the TV series). "Genre" is sort of thrown around like a magical word in the same way in which I have noted, in other posts, things like "logic" and "ethical" being thrown around as sort of nebulous magic words being invoked. "Adult high fantasy" sounds much more impressive than "Young Adult," and the importance of that fact is supposedly seen in the fact that those are "genre" terms ... a nice, fancy, educated, sophisticated sounding word that validates the speaker. In reality, some very good and creative and seminal literature winds up being works that break genre rules, and people who actually study literature know that it is a cardinal rule to be careful of making "genre" a procrustean bed, tortuously stretching (over-emphasizing certain elements that may in reality be minor) or amputating (completely disregarding elements that may in actuality be quite important) to make the piece fit the bed of the "genre" that you have decided it is. Genre is indeed in play as an aspect that must be considered in analysis, and it can often provide insight on tricky passages (e.g., how does the ancient genre of a vita [a "life," usually of a saint or venerated person] differ from the modern genre of "biography" and how might that explain this or that feature in a particular vita that seems anomalous if it is being read according to the categories of modern biography), but it should not be applied rigidly, and looking for places where the "rules" of a genre are broken, maybe combining two established "genres," can discover places of unique literary genius.
(On the side, I would also say that, with Game of Thrones and others, the "adult" part usually at least edges toward, and very often goes all the way into, "adult" in our contemporary consumerist sense ... although, I do think that Jim Butcher's Dresden Files are strong characterization and theme, even though they do get quite racy at times; I question his level of detail and think some of it is gratuitous but it is usually in the service of a valid, and often strong, thematic point, whereas GoT and the like are usually just "we're adults because we can talk about sex," what I call the "titillation of sophistication" or the "sophistication of titillation," not sure which works better .. they're both true).
P. 46: Not sure what she means by Numbers following Exodus in the "canonical order" because even BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stutgartensia critical edition of the Masoretic Hebrew text) and JPS (Jewish Publication Society edition of the same) have it after Leviticus. But this brings me to an interesting thought I never had before about the Pentateuch as a unit and the theory of the priestly as final redactor: Leviticus is the crux of a chiasm, Exodus and Numbers are traveling books (they come to Sinai in Ex 19 and leave in Num 11), Genesis is the getting kicked out of a Land (creation) and the promise of a new land, and Deuteronomy is prep for entering that new land ... basically getting ready to be re-recreated, restored to the Garden.
(Michael Coogan, in his intro textbook on the Hebrew Bible, covers a very interesting element in Jewish interpretation: The Decalogue in Exodus [ch. 20] is seen as completing the creation [actually, the fullest completion is the Temple, but this is a definitive and unique step in the line]: "Decalogue" literally means "10-word," and so our traditions speak of it as "the 10 commandments" [as an interesting aside, there is no numbering in the original text and Jewish interpretation does differently than Christian: Christian interpretation sees the first commandment as "you shall have no other gods before me" and "I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt" as simply a prologue to the whole set of ten commandments, whereas Judaism sees it as actually a part of the first commandment ... remember that this is the case and be this people to the full]. Jewish interpretation sees the Decalogue, the ten-word of Exodus 20, as matching the ten words of creation in Genesis 1, ten times when "and God said" is used in Genesis 1[the same exact verb and form, vayomar: third-person, masculine, singular, vav-consectutive-imperfect]. In Genesis 1, God created a cosmos through ten words, and in Exodus, God created a people, constituted them as a people by giving them the Law.")
P. 128: Goodman and Wittgenstein and Douglas's comments on the well-made suit ... sort of validates my use of clothing and body as imagery and the usefulness of that in examining chiasm.
P. 128-29: The idea of "repleteness" sparks an idea for me of "detective" clues: they are these the same kind of "internal cross-referencing," meaning that people who are doing predictions already have a little bit of an intuition about there being connections within a work?
p. 141-42: Bishop Gregory. This is what, when I finally get around to my large post on Tolkien vs Shakespeare, after reading the two books on WS as Catholic (one on his person/biography and one on his work), I will refer to as "mouthpiece literature." I will not mean it negatively, but simply as one among a number of ways for meaning to be present in a work. Rowling uses it to good effect with Dumbledore. Tolkien uses it with Gandalf sometimes ("and some who die deserve life ... can you give it to them? then don't be so quick to deal out death and punishment ... even the most wise cannot see all ends"). But Tolkien also uses what he calls "narrative art" in a way I don't think that you see in WS, and that if you try to make it fit WS, you come out with a religious writing bard who always does the same deus ex machina move and calls it "providence."
The essence of that post will probably wind up being (unless Captain Anglo-but-Catholic manages to surprise me and really blow my socks off with something) that I still think that the Tolkien perspective does have and is right to have a serious problem with a large impact of WS being the role of his work in a misguided placement of drama as the core of narrative art, whether that be through a focus of his own on doing exactly that, or a highjacking of him by modernism, or by his own focuses making him very easy to hijack thus, whatever the case may be (I think it is simply too demonstrable that things like, in Macbeth for example, the march of the woods and the charmed captain of evil tropes are completely devoid of any narratological symbolism and completely wrapped up in a psychological phenomenon of something like terror or the dramatic despair of the Macbeths).
The only thing that might change any of that would, I am simply guessing, not come from Captain Anglo-but-Catholic, but from somebody like John Granger or others who could demonstrate literary alchemical structuring in the plays akin to what they have hinted at as far as theories that the Globe Theater was designed on literary alchemical structuring. But alongside that narratolical shortfall, I will examine at least "mouthpiece" as a way to have meaning, and in the fifty pages I have read of the first of Captain Anglo-but-Catholic's books, the primarily biographical, he has had at least one good example of morality presented through a character of whom the author obviously takes (and can be easily read by even a popular audience as doing so) a stage-affirmative stance, which is how I would describe "mouthpiece literature" (although sometimes it can be done in the via negativa, such as the condemnation of "not speaking word" done in the fact that the person who says "I will never more speak word" at the end of Othello, Iago, obviously has stage-pejorative rating as one who incites murder). So I am guessing that the good captain can provide even more "mouthpiece" examples when I get into his book actually on the plays (but man is it going to be a long slog through his Anglo-triumpalism and conservative-market-ready heavy-handed rhetoric against the big bad bogeys of post-modernism).
P 142. On "the wrong kind of civilization" and an p. 125 on social Darwinism and the evolutionary model. This is, I think, pretty much straight up what I have referred to as scientism. I think that part of why we may have lost a taste for chiasm/ring is the linear-evolution thinking that goes along with scientism's reduction of "truth" to "historical" fact, or at least its idea that historical fact is the base mode of truth, and its assumption that scientific discourse is the base made of discourse (here is my post that probably best describes what I mean by "scientism").
P. 145: perhaps the cause of the postmodern skepticism is "knowing too much" ... my thoughts on Arnofsky's Pi (too much understanding will break the human mind).
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