In this post I continue my discussion of whole-plot ring composition with discussions of closure, frames, and dream narratives.
I. Closure: The repetition at the end of a novel (or a story or a poem) of material from the beginning can create a feeling of closure, as we can see in Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Here the last stanza is an exact repetition of the first stanza. (In a sense, however, no repetition is ever exact—when you read the first stanza for the first time, the words “brillig”, “slivy”, “toves”, and so on, are probably new to you, but when you read the last stanza, these are words you have already read.) The first stanza of the poem, the first A section of the ring, brings the reader into the world of the poem. The world of this poem is different from our ordinary world, so different that new words are needed to describe it. The B section of the ring introduces the characters and narrates the events. The second A section, an exact repetition of the first A section, tells the reader not to expect anything more; the world of the poem is closed.
The closure created in this poem might be called “closed closure”. There is no sense that the story might be continued with episodes about the Jubjub bird or the frumious Bandersnatch. But the instances of closure we have seen in my previous posts—in The Worm Ouroboros or Light in August or Germinal—could be called “open closure”, because in each there is a sense that the story continues. The rings round off the story, but they don’t preclude continuations—indeed, they indicate that more could be said. But each kind of open closure is different, as I suggested in my previous post. As we look at more examples we should be prepared to find more kinds of closure.
II. Frames. A lot can be said about framed narratives (such as the frames of the story collections The Thousand Nights and One Night, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron) but here I consider only whole-plot rings that provide a frame for a novel. A frame can distinguish what’s inside the frame from what’s outside. A narrative frame can be temporal, marking when the story begins and when it ends. Often the line between the inside and the outside is clear and sharp, but sometimes it can be fuzzy.
The whole plot rings in The Worm Ouroboros, Light in August, and Germinal function as frames. In Germinal, for instance, Étienne Lantier has a life before he arrives in Montsou (the first A section) and a life after he leaves (the second A section), but these are outside the story as it is told to us (the B section, which is the whole story of his time in Montsou). The ring defines the boundaries of the narrative.
Many stories are framed. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul and Virginia (first published in 1788) takes place on the island of Mauritius (also known as the Ile de France). The story begins: “On the eastern slope of the mountain that rises behind the town of Port Louis on the Ile de France may be seen, on a piece of ground once under cultivation, the remains of two small cabins”. The story continues with an extensive topographical description. In the third paragraph we meet the narrator of the story and his informant: “I loved to visit this place where I could enjoy at once a boundless view and the deepest solitude. One day, whilst I was seated beside the cabins and contemplating their ruined condition, a man well advanced in years passed by.” The narrator asks this old man to tell the story of these cabins. “And so, after pressing his hands to his forehead as if seeking to recall many sundry details, the old man told me this story.” The old man’s recitation, the sad story of Paul and Virginia, takes up the whole of the book, until the final short paragraph: “As he spoke these words the good old man went away shedding tears, and my own had fallen more than once in the course of his melancholy narration.” The story, the B section of the ring, is thus framed by the first A section, which takes us into the world of the story, and the second A section, which takes us out.
The frame of Paul and Virginia is provided by the narrator; he is not a character in the story, but he belongs to the world of the story. The frame of Light in August is provided by Lena Grove, who is a minor character in the main story. The frame of Germinal is provided by Étienne Lantier, who is the main character of the main story. E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros has a frame which is provided by a character outside the world of the main story. The novel begins which a section titled “Induction”, which begins: “There was a man named Lessingham, who lived in an old low house in Westdale, set in a gray old garden where yew-trees flourished that had seen Vikings in Copeland in their seeding time.” I leave out the details, but Lessingham sleeps that night in a room of his house called the Lotus room; and there he has a vision which carries him to the planet Mercury. His guide, a little martlet, tells him, “This is no dream. Thou, first of the children of men, art come to Mercury, where thou and I will journey up and down for a season to show thee the lands and ocean, the forests, plains, and ancient mountains, cities and palaces of this world Mercury, and the doings of them that dwell therein. But here thou canst not handle aught, neither make the folk ware of thee, not though thou shout thy voice hoarse. For thou and I walk here impalpable and invisible, as it were two dreams walking.” Lessingham perceives this world, and the reader perceives it because Lessingham perceives it, but Lessingham is not part of the world he perceives. His journey to Mercury is the initial frame of the story, the frame which divides his world on Earth from the world on Mercury, but at the end of the novel there is no return to Lessingham’s world and so the frame is not closed.
III. Dreams: I include in this category not only dream narratives strictly speaking, but also death narratives (such as William Golding’s Pincher Martin), visions, and astral journeys in general; all of these can provide a frame for a main narrative. The function of this kind of frame—dream, vision, death—is to move the story to another world. One of the earliest of such narratives occurs at the end of Plato’s Republic. Socrates tells his friend Glaucon the story of Er: he was killed in battle, but as his body was lying on the funeral pyre he revived and told people what he had seen in the land of the dead. His story takes about eight pages, too long to summarize here, but it is easy to read and quite fascinating. Some centuries later, Cicero imitated Plato’s myth of Er in his own dialogue De Re Publica; most of this dialogue has been lost, but we still have a section which is now usually called “Somnium Scipionis”, or “The Dream of Scipio”. Cicero clearly felt that the dream in his dialogue was equivalent to the death and resurrection of Er in Plato’s Republic. Both “The Myth of Er” and “The Dream of Scipio” are structured as rings: the death of Er begins the Myth and his return to life ends it; the Dream of Scipio begins as Scipio falls asleep and it ends when he wakes up.
The Myth of Er and the Dream of Scipio are short, just a few pages, but over the centuries there have been many book length dream narratives; I will mention just a few. The Romance of the Rose is a long allegorical poem in the form of a dream vision in two parts; the first part was written by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230 AD; the second and longer part was written by Jeun de Meun around 1275. The Romance is not much read today, except by scholars, but at one time it was extremely popular, and it’s worth reading, if you have a taste for allegory. Late in the 1300s the English writer William Langland wrote a long dream allegory titled Piers the Ploughman. John Bunyan’s dream vision The Pilgrim’s Progress appeared two parts, published in 1678 and 1684; this has retained its position as a classic of English literature. These are all explicitly framed by falling sleep and waking. At the beginning of the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, the narrator tells us, “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where there was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep, and as I slept I dreamed a dream.” And at the end of the first part, “So I awoke, and behold it was a dream.”
Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books are both dreams, but the stories are not revealed to be dreams until they end, so the dream is not quite a frame in either one. Robert Graves’ Watch the Northwind Rise (1949; also published as Seven Days in New Crete) is a sort of dream narrative and time-travel story, in which the main character is pulled into the future by witchcraft; this narrative machinery is not revealed for a few pages, when the main character tells one of his hosts in the future, “If I could be sure that my absence from home was causing no anxiety, I’d stay for as long as I was welcome”, and his host replies, “You needn’t worry about that. You’re asleep in your epoch, and at liberty to spend months or years here in a dream lasting no longer than from one breath to the next.”
All whole-plot rings have the same fundamental structure, but each one has its own meaning or function. In my next post I will discuss the whole-plot rings in James Branch Cabell’s The High Place, and Robert Heinlein’s Starman Jones.
The Art of Reading Slowly 