There’s lots more to say about ring composition; I may return to the topic if I come across a ring that deserves comment, but this post will be the last in this series of posts.
I. A story may be constructed so that the first link in the temporal sequence matches the last link. Thus at the beginning of Faulkner’s Light in August, Lena Gove arrives in Jefferson and at the end she leaves. But the temporal sequence of a plot can also be transformed to bring the end of the story up to the beginning, so the the sequence ABC…Z can become ZABC…Z. The ring is thus Z to Z rather than A to A. In previous discussions (see From Paragraphs to Plots) I have called this kind of temporal transformation Beginning with the Ending. Here, for instance, is the beginning of C. S. Forester’s novel The General (1936):
Nowadays Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Curzon, K.C.M.G., C.B., D.S.O, is just one of Bournemouth’s seven generals, but with the distinction of his record and his social position as a Duke’s son-in-law, he is really far more eminent than those bare words would imply. He is usually to be seen in his bath chair with Lady Emily, tall, raw-boned, tweed-skirted, striding behind.
This beginning is two paragraphs; I won’t quote the whole passage, but I note the words “greets his acquaintances”, “old-maidish smile”, and “very bad bridge”, and “plaid rug”. After this introductory passage, the story begins:
The day on which Curzon first stepped over the threshold of history, the day which was to start hm towards the command of a hundred thousand men, towards knighthood—and towards the bathchair on Bournemouth promenade—found him as a worried subaltern in any early South African battle.
The novel then follows Curzon’s career through his successive promotions, his marriage, and his final battle in the Great War when he was crippled. This is a wonderful novel, and I recommend it highly, so I won’t say more about the plot. But I will direct your attention to the last paragraph:
And now Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Curzon and his wife, Lady Emily, are frequently to be seen on the promenade at Bournmouth, he in his bathchair with a plaid rug, she in tweeds striding behind. He smiles his old-maidish smile at his friends, and his friends are pleased with that distinction, although he plays such bad bridge and is a little inclined to irascibility when the east wind blows.
This ending recapitulates the language of the beginning. Notice the accumulation of verbal reminiscences which reinforce the ring structure. Because it is a repetition, however, it somewhat abbreviates the beginning. Beginning with the Ending is quite common; I mention here just a few examples: V. S. Nailpaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas; L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I’m sure you can think of more.
II. James Branch Cabell’s The High Place: A Comedy of Disenchantment is a dream narrative, but with a twist. The novel begins on a sunny October afternoon in the year 1698 in the fictional country of Poictesme; Florian, the Prince de Lisuarte, the hero of the story, is a boy of ten years. The afternoon is “of the sun-steeped lazy sort” (3); Florian “lay yawning under the little tree from the east” (4); “the country of Poictesme was inexpressibly asleep” (4); Florian has been reading “all the stories in this curious new book, by old Monsieur Perrault” (5). Florian decides to have an adventure, and so he enters the forest of Acaire, where he has been told never to go. He meets a “small bright haired woman” named Mélusine, who guides him to the castle at the High Place, where time had been put on hold; there he sees the sleeping Princess Melior: “she seemed to him so lovely that Florian was never wholly willing, afterward, to admit she was but part of a dream” (8).
At the beginning of Chapter 2 Florian wakes from his dream: “he was lying upon the ground, with the fairy tales of Monsieur Perrault serving as Florian’s pillow” (10). Florian’s father “was looking down smilingly at the young lazibones whom the Duke’s foot was gently prodding into wakefulness. The Duke was wearing blue stockings with gold clocks, as Florian was to remember” (10–11).
So far, the first chapter seems to be a dream narrative in itself. Florian falls asleep at the beginning of the chapter and wakes up at the end. The boundaries of the dream ring are marked probably most clearly by Perrault’s book of fairy tales, on p. 5 and page 10. The dream captivates Florian, especially the vision of Melior: “he remembered Brunbelois and his journeying to the high place and the people seen there and, above all, the Princess Melior, with a clarity not like his memories of other dreams. Nor did the memory of her loveliness quite depart as Florian became older, and neither manhood nor marriage put out of his mind the beauty that he in childhood had, however briefly, seen” (10; see also 26).
The second chapter is mostly a long conversation between Florian and his father the Duke, after Florian wakes; this conversation sets many of the themes of the rest of the novel, but the themes are not relevant to this post about rings. Time passes in Chapter Three and brings us to Florian at the age of 35. He has married five times; his wives died with “a uniform prematureness”. Florian is in fact a kind of moral monster; he has a certain charm, perhaps, but the reader’s judgement of this hero must be one of the central problems of the novel.
An important turning point in the plot occurs in Chapters Four and Five, when Florian meets a strange character known as Janicot, “the adversary of all the gods of man” (40). Florian tells Janicot about his dream of Melior and his inability since then to find any satisfaction with any other woman. He and Janicot enter into a bargain: Janicot will arrange for Florian to have Melior as his wife for one year, and Florian will then give over his child with Melior “by the old ritual” (48). This ritual is not specified, but the reader can surmise Janicot’s “old ritual”.
Now that this bargain has been made, Florian returns to the castle of Brunbelois, where as a child of ten he had seen Melior in a dream. (His return to Brunbelois is marked by a number of repetitions of his dream; these create something of an interior ring.) He wakes the sleeping princess, and the fairy tale princess of his dream becomes his all too flesh and blood mortal wife.
I won’t detail the plot. It is enough to say that things don’t work out the way Florian hoped, and by the end of the book he is even more disenchanted than he was before. I won’t explain how the moral and narrative problems become untied. It is enough to say that Janicot and the Archangel Michael come to an agreement: they decide to set the clock back to Florian’s childhood, so that all the events of the novel would become just a dream. (The word “dream” and its forms is repeated a dozen times or so at the end of the penultimate chapter, page 299 to page 302, and another dozen or so in the last chapter, from page 304 to page 311.) So at the beginning of the final chapter, Florian wakes up as a ten-year old boy again, prodded once again by his father’s foot. The ring is reinforced by a number of repetitions from the beginning of the book: his father’s blue stockings with gold clocks (304; cf. 11); the charmed tree (305; cf. 4, 9, 10); Perrault’s book of fairy tales (5, 10); and Florian wakes on a “sun-steeped and tranquil and ineffably lazy October afternoon” (309), as he fell asleep at the beginning of the book on an “October afternoon . . . of the sun-steeped lazy sort” (3; 4). Thus the novel has two dream rings: the first chapter in itself and the story as whole.
III. At the beginning of Robert Heinlein’s Starman Jones, Max, the young hero of the story, is taking it easy after a days’ work. “Max liked this time of day, this time of year. With the crops in, he could finish his evening chores early and be lazy. When he had slopped the hogs and fed the chickens, instead of getting supper he followed a path to a rise west of the barn and lay down on the grass, unmindful of chiggers. [. . .] A blue jay made remarks about his honesty, then shut up when he failed to move. A red squirrel sat on a stump and stared at him, then went on burying nuts.” From where he is lying, Max can see “the steel stilts and guide rings of the Chicago, Springfield, & Earthport Ring Road emerge from a slash in the ridge to his right”. There follows a detailed description of the Ring Road. “Max kept his eyes fixed on the cut; the Tomahawk was due any instant. Suddenly there was a silver gleam, a shining cylinder with needle nose burst out of the cut, flashed through the last ring and for a breathless moment was in trajectory between the ridges. Almost before he could swing his eyes, the projectile entered the ring across the gap and disappeared into the hillside—just as the sound hit him. ¶ It was a thunderclap that bounced around the hills. Max gasped for air. ‘Boy!’ he said softly. ‘Boy, oh Boy!’” (5–7).
The plot of this novel is a simple Horatio Alger tale—poor boy makes good. Max is stuck on this farm in Arkansas with an unsympathetic widowed step-mother and a new step-step-father. He runs away from home and manages to lie his way onto the crew of a starship. He starts at the bottom and works his way up. The starship is lost in space; through a series of accidents Max rises until he becomes the captain of the starship; he then guides the ship back into known space and saves the day. All of this is most beautifully contrived, with engaging characters and thrilling events. I first read this book when I was ten or twelve; I loved it then and I love it still. If you have any taste for adventure stories, I recommend it highly.
The penultimate chapter ends as Max saves the ship. The last chapter, like the first, is titled “The Tomahawk”. It begins: “Max liked this time of day, this time of year. He was lying in the grass on the little rise west of the barn, with his head propped up so he could see to the northwest. If he kept his eyes there, on the exit ring of the C.S.&E. Ring Road, he would be able, any instant now, to see the Tomahawk plunge out and shoot across the gap in free trajectory. At the moment he was not reading, no work was pushing him, he was just being lazy and enjoying the summer evening. ¶ A squirrel sat up nearby, stared at him, decided he was harmless and went about its business. A bird swooped past. ¶ There was a breathless hush, then suddenly a silver projectile burst out of the exit ring, plunged across the draw and entered the ring on the far side—just as the sound hit him. ¶ ‘Boy, oh boy!’ he said softly” (313).
This passage recapitulates the language of the beginning. We notice that in both passages Max is lying on the little rise west of the barn. Both passages mention a squirrel and a bird. Both passages use the phrase “just as the sound hit him”, and in both passages Max says “Boy, oh boy!” But the second passage is somewhat abbreviated—for instance, where the beginning spells out the Chicago, Springfield, & Earthport Ring Road, the ending just says the C.S.&E. Both passages use the word “projectile”, but the description of the projectile is longer in the first passage. At the beginning Max has just slopped the hogs and fed the chickens; these chores are not mentioned at the end; this difference will turn out to be significant.
At this point the reader might be tempted to think that this whole story is just a wish-fulfillment dream; the ring would mark the beginning and the end of Max’s dream on this lazy summer afternoon. But quickly the reader finds that the story was not a dream. In the second passage, just after the Max sees the silver projectile, he pulls from his pocket a letter from one of the passengers on the spaceship. And in the following paragraphs we learn that Max is just about to go off for his new position as assistant astrogator (that is, stellar navigator) on the spaceship Elizabeth Regina. Max has just returned home to see the old farm before he ships off again. He finds the farm abandoned: his wicked step-mother and her new husband have disappeared. There are no more hogs to slop or chickens to feed. But Max will once again set out for the stars. Perhaps the reader will not even for a moment be fooled into thinking that the story is all just a dream, though I think that the form raises that possibility; at a minimum it admits that the plot is a kind of wish fulfillment, a kind of dream. Heinlein has taken advantage of the conventions of ring composition to add another layer of meaning.
The Art of Reading Slowly 