In the past few years I’ve been exploring a three-part framework for analyzing narratives. This framework asks three questions about a story: How is it composed? What does it represent? And what does it mean? To designate these three perspectives I have borrowed terms from James Phelan: the Synthetic Aspect, the Mimetic Aspect, and the Thematic Aspect. (I should note that Phelan does not approve of the way I use these terms—for discussion, see the book Phelan and I wrote about all this, “Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative”.)
A good way to explain what I mean by these terms and how I use them is to show the framework at work in the analysis of a passage. My sample text is the first chapter of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, which was first published in 1985 and won the National Book Award that year. Here is the first paragraph of the first chapter. This paragraph is presented with no introduction, so that’s how I will present it here:
“The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved towards the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut crème patties, Waffelos and Kabooks, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.” (3)
This passage is dominated by an instance of the rhetorical figure congeries, which is simply defined as a heap of words—the Latin word “congeries” means “a heap”. Instances of congeries are not hard to find; I have collected examples from Homer (The Iliad), Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano), Rudyard Kipling (The Just-so Stories), Anthony Trollope (The Warden), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), Ursula LeGuin (The Lathe of Heaven), Louis de Bernières (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Katherine Anne Porter (Ship of Fools), Charles Dickens (Little Dorrit), Martin Amis (The Zone of Interest), and others.
The items in a typical congeries are things, material objects, as in this congeries from White Noise, though lists of other sorts also occur. This congeries includes some minimal information beyond the list. The reader can deduce that these items are the possessions of middle-class students arriving at college. These students themselves appear briefly in the middle of the passage. Some of the things are grouped in sets, such as exercise equipment (“bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts”) or electronic devices (“stereo sets, radios, personal computers”). It may be strategic that the list ends with junk food (“onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut crème patties, Waffelos and Kabooks, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints”), but otherwise the list seems to have no particular overall shape; the relative lack of internal syntax suggests that the things are related to each other only by juxtaposition, and what matters is the list as a whole, rather than any particular thing in the list. A congeries of this kind can be seen as almost pure mimesis, the pure representation of some things which are the furniture of this narrative world. In this congeries the things are not just things, they are things that represent modern American consumer culture and the privileged social position of adolescents in the American middle class.
Even this brief analysis of a short passage of this novel shows all three narrative aspects: from a synthetic perspective, the passage is a congeries; from a mimetic perspective, it lists a lot of things the students are bringing to college; and from a thematic perspective, this list of things represents something about later twentieth-century middle-class society. These three aspects are simultaneous: the reader does not first read the passage from the synthetic perspective, then from the mimetic perspective, then from the thematic perspective. The synthetic and the mimetic create the thematic, which could not be expressed without them.
The narrative situation of the congeries in White Noise is, for the moment, unspecified. Perhaps it is spoken or written by an omniscient third-person extra-diegetic narrator, or perhaps by a character within the story—in this paragraph there is no way to tell. As it stands the list has a certain objectivity—this is a list of just what’s there—but the decision to begin the book with this congeries is thematic.
The subject pronoun that begins the second paragraph of White Noise shows that the narrator sits within the story, but at an ironic distance from the spectacle. (We learn his name, Jack Gladney, in the second chapter.)
“I’ve witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always. The parents stand sun-dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction. The conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people’s names. Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage. This assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation.”
The writing is brilliant, and again we see the three aspects operating simultaneously. Synthetic: The first paragraph was dominated by one figure, congeries, but this paragraph uses several devices: surprising collocations (“sodden collapse”, “criminal pleasures”, “conscientious suntans”); sentence fragments (“The conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks.”); tricolon with asyndeton (“a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation”). Mimetic: The paragraph characterizes the owners of the items listed in the initial congeries—first the students, then their mothers and fathers. Thematic: The paragraph continues the satiric critique of American middle-class life.
The next paragraph tells us more about the narrator and his environment:
I left my office and walked down the hill and into town. There are houses in town with turrets and two-story porches where people sit in the shades of ancient maples. There are Greek revival and Gothic churches. There is an insane asylum with an elongated portico, ornamental dormers and a steeply pitched roof topped by a pineapple finial. Babette and I and our children by previous marriages live at the end of a quiet street in what was once a wooded area with deep ravines. There is an expressway beyond the backyard now, well below us, and at night as we settle into our brass bed the sparce traffic washes past, a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.
Here we learn that the narrator has an office on campus; he also has a wife—not his first—and children. The description of the town provides a contrast to the smug middle-class prosperity detailed in the first two paragraphs, but it is perhaps significant that the only buildings singled out here are churches and the insane asylum. The synthetic aspect is not in the foreground, as it was in the first two paragraphs, but one might note the triple anaphora (“There are . . . There are . . . There is”), as well as the tricolon crescendo in the description of the asylum (“an elongated portico, ornamental dormers and a steeply pitched roof topped by a pineapple finial”). These touches are the work of a careful stylist. The final phrase of the paragraph (“dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream”) may be an allusion to the souls Odysseus sees in the land of the dead (Odyssey Book 11); it certainly has thematic implications, but what they are I hesitate to say. The expressway beyond the backyard will be important at the very end of the novel, in ring composition.
The fourth paragraph provides further information about the narrator:
“I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. I invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968. It was a cold bright day with intermittent winds out of the east. When I suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler’s life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success. The chancellor went on to serve as an advisor to Nixon, Ford, and Carter before his death on a ski lift in Austria.”
The concept of Hitler studies is surely of thematic interest, though this theme remains somewhat undeveloped in the rest of the novel. The phrase “Hitler’s life and work” is probably ironic: “X’s life and work” is more likely if applied to an artist. This paragraph includes a good deal of what might be called narrative surplus. Is the reader expected to find any significance in the weather on the day the narrator invented Hitler studies, or in the chancellor’s later career, or in the manner of his death? Narrative surplus may provide mimetic depth, a suggestion that the world of the story has a reality beyond the needs of the story.
The final paragraph of the chapter continues the narrative surplus:
“At Fourth and Elm, cars turn left at the supermarket. A policewoman crouched inside a boxlike vehicle patrols the area looking for cars parked illegally, for meter violations, lapsed inspection stickers. On telephone poles all over town there are homemade signs concerning lost dogs and cats, sometimes in the handwriting of a child.”
None of this has any narrative consequence, and there is no link connecting the end of the first chapter to the beginning of the second. The interest of the paragraph lies primarily in the representation of life in a small college town. The chapter begins sforzando and ends diminuendo.
For analytical convenience I have discussed each paragraph as an individual unit, but all three aspects operate over larger stretches of narrative. For instance, the first paragraph begins “The station wagons arrived at noon”, and the last sentence of the second paragraph begins “This assembly of station wagons”. The repetition of “station wagons” creates a small ring; the two paragraphs are a narrative unit which describes the smug prosperity of the students and their families—station wagons are the typical vehicle of the suburban middle-class. Construction coincides with representation and signification. The policewoman reappears at the end of Chapter 5.
In addition, we can note a progressive unfolding of information about the narrator: there is none in the first paragraph; the second paragraph begins “I’ve witnessed this spectacle every September”; the third begins “I left my office”; the fourth begins “I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies”; but the fifth tells us nothing further about him. Clearly this organization is deliberate; if, say, all the information about the narrator had been offered in the first paragraph, the effect would have been very different.
The analytical method I have sketched can also be seen as a sort of challenge. Given a reasonably long text—just how long is a matter of practice and judgment rather than theory—is it possible to say something worthwhile about how it is composed? What it represents? What it means? In this sample text, the first chapter of White Noise, the three aspects, and their interdependence, are easy to see. Will other texts also submit to this method? The proof is in the pudding.
The Art of Reading Slowly 