Patterns could fascinate me because an uncanny one structured my life. When I was four, my parents and another couple traded partners, creating families as symmetrical as moth wings. A diplomat father, a mother, and two little girls the same ages on either side, a boy born to each pair soon after. Both fathers were in the foreign service (mine Australian; the other, American), and over the years one family toured the eastern hemisphere, as the other toured the western; ditto southern and northern. Our summer, their winter; our day, their night. Geographical mirrors.
Symmetry orders the lobes of leaves and insect wings, so why not my family? When I learned of the Coriolis force, the symmetry got more elaborate: waters and winds spin one way in the northern hemisphere, the opposite way in the southern. Picture hurricanes, oceanic gyres. I saw myself spinning one way in life, my counterpart stepsister spinning the other. So I stole the Coriolis force as a personal pattern, and the clarity, the order, helped me.
Some people love chaos; others crave order. I don’t love the coldness implicit in order but know that I need it. There was so much moving before I was twelve that the very state of flux felt constant—changing landscapes, languages, people; even my name, nationality, and accent. I needed ways to translate what rolled past and through me into something fixed. A spider instinct: to net life in image and word. I was always lying on a floor, drawing or writing or designing, catching in shapes the whirr of life. Later, I’d love structures that sorted things, such as the grammar of Latin sentences and how parts cogged together, Linnaeus’s branching genera, and the genealogies of myth. Patterns: sense.
A trope of foreign-service life, which is like that instinct to net and akin to how I see narrative: rolling down a tarmac, forehead pressed to glass, as a place I’d lived in a few years stops being a streaming slur around me but, as the plane rises, gradually drops away and becomes distant and still, a form I can look at. There’s the main boulevard (where I’d seen a dog hit by a truck), and it bisects a grid of plazas and blocks, all of it hemmed by mountains (I’d run down one’s peak, ecstatic). What had been life blurring all around became something to see as a whole and ponder. The first step toward art?
In the language of neuroscientists this would be a shift from “egocentric” spatial knowledge to “allocentric,” from understanding what’s around you subjectively to taking a more remote view, even an aerial point of view, now seeing overall shape, relations beyond yourself.
And now back to writing, to finding patterns in life and re-creating them in words. Memoirists know that they must “look” back over life to find patterns that give order. We use visual and spatial terms so easily: look back. But this is true for anyone writing any kind of narrative. Yes, there’s the word-afterword motion through a story’s tunnels, but ultimately that motion takes on a larger shape: the figure in the carpet, footsteps in sand. And how curious that a single shape has governed our stories for years.
The famous arc came from drama. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Aristotle dissected the structures of tragedies such as Sophocles’ Oedipus the King to find their common features, much as he might dissect snakes to see if their spines were alike. He found that powerful dramas shared certain features, including a particular path. Here’s (some of) what he wrote in Poetics:
A tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself [with a] beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it. A well-constructed Plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes. . . . To be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must not only present a certain order in its arrangement of parts, but also be of a certain definite magnitude. . . . Just as . . . a beautiful living creature must be of . . . a size to be taken in by the eye, so a story or Plot must be of . . . a length to be taken in by the memory.
And:
Every tragedy is in part Complication and in part Dénouement; the incidents before the opening scene, and often certain also of those within the play, forming the Complication; and the rest the Dénouement. By Complication I mean all from the beginning of the story to the point just before the change in the hero’s fortunes; by Dénouement, all from the beginning of the change to the end.
Beginning, middle, and end; complication, change, dénouement. Two thousand years later, in The Technique of the Drama, Gustav Freytag examined Greek and Shakespearean tragedies and drew a graphic like the pattern Aristotle described, a triangle showing the parts of drama: introduction, rise, climax, return or fall, and catastrophe. This is Freytag’s famous triangle or pyramid. John Gardner’s Art of Fiction helped make the link between tragedy and fiction:
The most common form of the novel is energeic. . . . By his made-up word energeia . . . Aristotle meant “the actualization of the potential that exists in character and situation.” (The fact that Aristotle was talking about Greek tragedy need not delay us. If he’d known about novels, he’d have said much the same.) Logically, the energeic novel falls into three parts, Aristotle’s “beginning, middle, and end,” which we may think of as roughly equal in length and which fall into the pattern exposition, development, and denouement . . .
But shouldn’t the fact that Aristotle was talking about tragedy rather than novels indeed delay us? Novels didn’t exist for Aristotle and weren’t Freytag’s subject. Gardner does talk about other structures for fiction, but he firmly favors the causality of the arc and says that Aristotle would, too.
I doubt it. Aristotle analyzed specimens to understand their structures; why wouldn’t he dissect actual specimens of fiction? He comes close to saying what Gardner believes, though, when he shifts focus from tragedy to narrative poetry:
As for the poetry which merely narrates . . . it has several points in common with Tragedy: 1) The construction of its stories should clearly be like that in a drama; they should be based on a single action, one that is a complete whole in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end, so as to enable the work to produce its own proper pleasure with all the organic unity of a living creature.
But fiction doesn’t “merely narrate”: this is one of its great potencies. In the centuries that Western fiction has taken to arise, it’s evolved to do many things, especially in the most cannibalistic form, the novel. Terry Eagleton sums it up:
The point about the novel . . . is not just that it eludes definitions, but that it actively undermines them. It is less a genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together. You can find poetry and dramatic dialogue in the novel, along with epic, pastoral, satire, history, elegy, tragedy and any number of other literary modes. Virginia Woolf described it as “this most pliable of all forms.” The novel quotes, parodies and transforms other genres, converting its literary ancestors into mere components of itself in a kind of Oedipal vengeance on them.
Drama is just one of many arts that have fed fiction. The arc is a perfect expression for the movement of tragedy as Aristotle saw it, and it’s created masses of elegant stories. But given that the kinds of stories in fiction aren’t as set as in tragedy, why should anyone insist that the arc form them?
Then there’s the arc’s irksome sexual aspect. Here’s the critic Robert Scholes:
The archetype of all fiction is the sexual act. . . . For what connects fiction—and music—with sex is the fundamental orgastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and consummation. In the sophisticated forms of fiction, as in the sophisticated practice of sex, much