In my previous post I looked at an instance of Ring Composition in E. R. Eddison’s fantasy novel, The Worm Ouroboros. Rings come in various sizes and shapes. In a simple ring the beginning of a passage is repeated at the end: ABA. Some rings are more complicated: ABCBA or even more. (See, for instance, Cedric Whitman’s analysis of Homeric Rings in Homer and the Heroic Tradition.) The more complex structures I call Mirrors; Mirrors are a subclass of Rings. (Eric Ambler’s thriller Passage of Arms has an excellent Mirror plot, which I have discussed in From Paragraphs to Plots.)
Rings can also be different sizes. A small ring would be roughly the size of a paragraph, a large ring would be the whole of a novel, and there can be rings any size in between. Perhaps the different sizes of rings should have different names; I will just use descriptive phrases, such as “paragraph ring”, “chapter ring”, “episode ring”, and “whole plot ring”. For the next few posts, I will be particularly interested in whole plot rings. Here’s a list off the top of my head of novels that have whole plot rings:
The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton; Fifth Business, Robertson Davies; Light in August, William Faulkner; The Iliad, Homer; Starman Jones, Robert Heinlein; Tunnel in the Sky, Robert Heinlein; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières; Germinal, Emile Zola; Roderick Hudson, Henry James; The Tree of Man, Patrick White; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey; The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy; For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemmingway; The Mother’s Recompense, Edith Wharton; A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess; The General, C. S. Forester; The Worm Ouroboros, E. R. Eddison; Passage of Arms, Eric Ambler; Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison.
All these have some kind of repetition between (roughly) the beginning and (roughly) the end, but the ways they go about constructing repetition are various, as are the uses and meanings of various ring structures.
In this post I will look at William Faulkner’s Light in August and Émile Zola’s Germinal. Both of these have Arrival/Departure plots; Arrival/Departure plots are inherently symmetrical, but some in addition have specific repetitions which mark them as rings. (Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is an example of an Arrival/Departure plot—plus a little coda—that is not marked as a ring.)
Light in August begins as a young woman named Lena Grove arrives in Jefferson. She is pregnant and unmarried and she is looking for the father of her baby. The novel ends as she leaves Jefferson. Here’s the first paragraph of the novel:
“Sitting beside the road, watching the waggon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old”
The last sentence of the paragraph ends without a period. Here’s the last paragraph of the novel:
“‘My, my. A body does get around. Here we ain’t been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it’s already Tennessee.’” The period at the end of this sentence, in contrast to the lack of a period at the beginning of the novel, may indicate a kind of closure.
The novel as a whole is a ring, from the first chapter to the last, and the first chapter is a ring in itself. Here is the end of the first chapter: “‘My, my’, she says; ‘here I ain’t been on the road but four weeks, and now I am in Jefferson already. My, my. A body does get around.’” The end of the chapter forms a ring with the beginning. The final paragraph of the novel then repeats some of the words of the final paragraph of the first chapter: “My, my. A body does get around.” The initial chapter ring may prepare the reader for the ring at the very end of the novel.
The first chapter is the initial A portion of the ABA whole plot ring, and the first A section is a ring in itself. The final A portion begins at the beginning of the last chapter, as an unnamed furniture repairer tells his wife about coming across Lena and Byron. The B portion is everything in between.
Lena’s arrival and departure frame the story. The Ring marks the events inside the frame as a narrative unit, as the frame of a painting marks what’s inside the frame as a pictorial unit. A frame marks off a particular chunk of reality—it distinguishes the world inside from the world outside. The story inside Lena’s frame is complicated and dramatic, with several major characters (Joe Christmas, Gail Hightower, Joanna Burden) linked in a complex pattern. Lena appears inside the frame but she is not a major character. Her slow and steady progress, from Alabama to Mississippi to Tennessee, is a contrast to the drama inside the frame. This aspect of Lena’s story is explicitly noted (with an allusion to Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”) in the first chapter: she is “like something moving forever and without progress across an urn”. But Lena is not quite unchanged at the end of the story: she has had her baby, and she is now accompanied by Byron Bunch, who has fallen in love with her when he first sees her in Jefferson. And yet there is a sense that Lena herself is unchanged and unchanging.
At the beginning of Zola’s Germinal, an unemployed worker named Étienne Lantier arrives in the town of Montsou, looking for work. He gets a job in a mine and stays for just over a year. During the year he takes a leading role in a strike, which fails and leaves the workers worse off than they were before the strike. The novel is a vivid depiction of labor conditions in late nineteenth century France. At the end of the novel Lantier leaves, on his way to Paris where he hopes to become a labor activist.
The initial A portion of the ABA ring begins at the beginning of the first chapter as Lantier arrives; the final A portion begins at the beginning of the last chapter when he leaves. The B portion is everything in between. At the beginning of the first chapter Étienne is walking in the middle of the night from Marchiennes to Montsou (19); at the beginning of the last chapter he is walking in the middle of the night from Montsou to Marchiennes to catch the train to Paris (488). In the first chapter and the last chapter he is walking through a field of beets (the word “betteraves” occurs in the first paragraph and the last paragraph of the novel). Étienne arrives in Monsou at the end of March; he leaves in April a year later. In the first chapter the mine is described as a voracious beast, ready to devour the world (21: “lui semblait avoir un air mauvais de bête goulue, accroupie là pour manger le monde”); in the last chapter the mine is a monster swallowing human flesh (489: “le monstre avalant sa ration de chair humaine”); the words are different, but the ideas are similar.
Lantier is the major character in the framed interior B section of Germinal, while Lena Grove plays only a minor role in the B section of Light in August. Lena is hardly changed by the events of the novel; her final words are identical to her words at the end of the first chapter. But the Lantier who leaves Montsou is very different from the Lantier who arrived just a year earlier—at the very end of the penultimate chapter, when Lantier is rescued from the mine disaster which is the climax of the novel, his hair has turned white, and at the end of the novel he has discovered his political vocation. The action of Light in August, from the time Lena arrives until the time she leaves, is a few weeks; the action of Germinal takes just over a year, and the narration at the end emphasizes the turn of the seasons—from the cold of a wintery March to the beginning of spring the next April. Both novels end with what might be called an open closure—a sense that this episode is over, but more will happen down the road.
These three rings—in The Worm Ouroboros, Light in August, and Germinal—all provide closure while hinting at a continuation of the story, but the continuations are not all the same. The end of The Worm Ouroboros suggests a literal repetition of the events of the story; at the end of Light in August, Lena is almost unchanged, but there is no sense that her story will repeat exactly as she continues her travels; the events of Germinal have prepared Lantier for a new and different life.
I my next post I will discuss closure, frames, and dream narratives in ring plots.
The Art of Reading Slowly 