But now that Gardner’s got me imagining what Aristotle would say of fiction, I want to look at one of the philosopher’s core concepts about art forms altogether. I love that he likens specimens of literary art to living creatures, having organic unity—indeed, having souls. “The first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot.” The term soul here is part of his conceptual framework of hylomorphism. Hylo or hule = matter, and morphe = form; hylomorphism refers to the compound of matter and form that exists in both artifacts and living beings. Matter has potential that is made actual by form. Imagine a lump of clay that someone wants to shape into a bird. That lump has the potential to look like a bird, but only if, along with clay, there exists the abstract idea, or form, of “bird” (and an artist to shape it). Once the clay has been modeled into a bird, it’s a compound of matter and form: a piece of art. The form that it could be has actualized the potential existing in that matter. In a living being, the corollary to matter is body, and the corollary to form is soul. Soul animates body to make a living being, just as form animates matter to make a piece of art. So when Aristotle says that “plot” is the “soul” of tragedy, he means that plot is the idea of a shape that will turn potential into an actualized whole.
Rather than expecting the “soul” or animating shape of fiction to be a plotted arc, why not imagine other shapes? The arc makes sense for tragedy, but fiction can be wildly other. Especially now, when, to survive as a species, it had better exploit all it can that isn’t drama. Sukenick says, “Instead of reproducing the form of previous fiction, the form of the novel should seek to approximate the shape of our experience”; Aristotle understood art forms as organic beings. Wouldn’t it make sense for the shape of our experience to be organic? Organic, but not necessarily orgasmic.
I first grew restless with the arc and plot and wanted something different in 2001. I was living in Germany and, to learn the language further, met once a month with three women (architects) to discuss a book; one had chosen W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. Sebald was exciting readers on both sides of the Atlantic for his unusual narratives, and I’d just published a novel and begun teaching so was hungry to know more. German didn’t come easily, Sebald’s sure didn’t, but going slowly and following the flows of his syntax led me, at last, to sense: a little like reading Henry James, but in German. If you think about the difference between parataxis and hypotaxis in sentences you’ll see what I mean. Parataxis is linear and sequential: he got up and walked to the window and looked down and decided to go out, etc. Hypotaxis is more spatial, foregrounding some parts of the sentence and letting others recede, more interested in comparative relations among elements than in straight temporality: It was only after he’d woken up and lain in bed awhile, wondering whether he’d look out the window or instead ignore the world outside and step into the closet, that he finally decided to get up. In this sentence you have to wait until the end for the next action: the rest is a mental suspension, considering possibilities, not just watching what happens next. German sentences are like this, withholding main verbs until the end, and The Emigrants as a narrative was like this, too: not about what happened next but instead weaving a net whose design I wouldn’t see until I’d finished.
To read each of the book’s four narratives was like floating dreamily backward along a dark river. But what most engaged me was trying to see how the parts wove a larger design. “The Butterfly Man,” a figure appearing in each part but only faintly linked to “plot,” seemed a clue. He appears first as a photograph of Nabokov with a butterfly net, to show what a character looks like. Elsewhere he’s a boy chasing butterflies, a man on a mountain urging a character not to leap, or a man popping out of nowhere with a net. He seems to be an emblem recurring with variations, a ghost of an emerging idea, or like a figurehead at the bowsprit, leading me on. But to what?
Near the end of the book, I’d begun hatching a theory and was translating as fast as I could to see if it would hold. But the book was due at the library, and as I handed it over and asked for an extension, the librarian crisply said Nein and off the book sailed on a conveyor belt. I went to every bookstore in Karlsruhe, Durlach, and Heidelberg, but no one had Sebald’s books, because he’d just been in the tragic crash that killed him.
It took weeks to get a copy, an English translation now. When I opened it in a grocery store checkout line, a name-change for the last narrative’s main figure—legally necessary in the English edition, it turned out—startled me so much that I put the book back down and forgot it under the lettuce: the original name had been my key. Only the next day, when the store reopened, could I recover the book and the theory.
More about this in a later chapter. The point now: Sebald’s Emigrants was the first book to show me a way beyond the causal arc to create powerful forward motion in narrative: motion less inside the story than inside your mind as you construct sense. This motion involved pattern, arising (I later learned) “from the spatial interweavings of images and phrases independent of any time-sequence of narrative action” (Joseph Frank, “The Idea of Spatial Form”). The Butterfly Man was that image.
Sebald was hardly alone in losing interest in causal plot and the persistent arc. But in twenty years of teaching, I’m bothered again and again that so many smart young writers feel obliged to follow it. It wasn’t a given as Western fiction crawled to life, but gradually became a convention, with writers resisting it often. Other cultures evolved fiction differently from the start: Ming Dong Gu explains that Chinese fiction grew with an emphasis on lyricism, not constrained by “the Platonic-Aristotelian restriction of poetics to imitation and narration.” It relies on pattern, repetition, and rhythm and is “organized on a structural principle different from the time-based, direction-oriented, and logically coherent principle of the Western narrative.”
As Nigel Krauth puts it, “If one needs a short cut to understanding the nature of the Radical in [Western] literature, one might think first about concepts related to the singular, the linear, the beginning-middle-and-end structure, and think how a writer can replace them with multiplicity, collage or a rhizome of fragments.” Think of the Modernists’ shift from the “omniscient” narrator toward narratorial consciousness that follows the tangles of human sensibility. Or the many multistranded novels that arose early last century, the Oulipists with their fabulous strictures and the possibilities these strictures opened, the Nouveau-Romanists and their experiments with objectivism, and so on.
Writers have proposed other patterns for narrative, too. Italo Calvino says that in Invisible Cities, thinking of the shape of a crystal, he “built up a many-faceted structure in which each brief text is close to the others in a series that does not imply logical sequence or a hierarchy, but a network in which one can follow multiple routes and draw multiple, ramified conclusions.” Others might call this pattern nodular. Gottfried Benn spoke of an orange-shaped narrative, in which all segments radiate from or lean toward a central pith. Ross Chambers coined the (terrible) term “loiterature” for narratives that digress extravagantly, that are often labyrinthine. Krauth speaks of reading radially to apprehend fragmented works:
It’s like picking up a scrap of evidence—you know there is a whole circle of story around the piece—and you keeping [sic] on going to gather more. Perhaps our “instinct” for reading linearly is becoming less innate. While I know what I describe is a radical way of reading, I would actually call it radial: a kind of reading ultimately devoted to finding a meaningful centre to the swirl of narrative elements presented, but which is prepared to wait (for up to 150 pages) for the ways in and out of that centre to emerge.
And Joseph Frank launched many of these conversations with his groundbreaking essay “The Idea of Spatial Form,” where he described a species of fiction in which juxtaposition or association replaces temporal order, each piece a part of a puzzle, or the whole forming a network of sense.
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