A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic

by Peter Turchi

  More to our purpose: Freytag wasn’t trying to tell anyone how to write a short story or novel. He was analyzing plays, with particular emphasis on the Greeks and Shakespeare, and how those earlier plays informed German practice.

  Geometry means earth measure. Why on earth should we expect a nineteenth-century German’s nontriangular illustration of Greek drama to describe twenty-first-century stories?

  THE WRITER AS WAYFARER

  In discussions of work in progress, and in evaluating our own drafts, we are sometimes inclined to overemphasize the movement from beginning to end, what we often call story or plot, actions or events. This is not to say story, plot, actions, and events are unimportant. William Goldman (Hollywood legend, author of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, among many other screenplays and novels) says that a screenplay needs to have a spine, and every scene must be attached to that spine, and that’s useful advice, particularly for a certain type of tightly knit fiction. Before him, Aristotle said, “A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end,” and

  plot . . . should imitate a single, unified action—and one that is also a whole. So the structure of the various sections of the events must be such that the transposition or removal of any one section dislocates and changes the whole. If the presence or absence of something has no discernible effect, it is not part of the whole.

  But overemphasizing that single line of continuity running from beginning to end can be a mistake. Even Aristotle recognized the value of reversal, astonishment, and the irrational.

  Certainly, plot is a useful and often engaging element of fiction, just as paraphraseable content and even narrative can be among the memorable aspects of a poem. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” would not be much without the charge of the light brigade, Walt Whitman’s “Noiseless, Patient Spider” needs its web-spinning spider, and without that horse and the snowy evening we’d care less about why Robert Frost was in a funk. Beginning, middle, and ending are important; but the thing we most prize in a story or novel or poem is rarely that simple journey from start to finish.

  The line that describes the beautiful is elliptical. It has simplicity and constant change. It cannot be described by a compass, and it changes direction at every one of its points.

  — RUDOLF ARNHEIM

  The Orochon people of the Russian Far East have long depended on hunting reindeer. According to anthropologist Tim Ingold, “As they go on their way, [Orochon] hunters are ever attentive to the landscape that unfolds along the path, and to its living animal inhabitants. Here and there, animals may be killed. But every kill is left where it lies, to be retrieved later, while the path itself meanders on. . . . When, however, the hunter subsequently goes back to collect his kill, he drives his sledge directly to the site where the carcass has been cached.” The path taken on the hunt, referred to as the saddle path, meanders, and has no predetermined destination; the return path, or sledge path, is, in contrast, the most direct path between the carcasses and the destination. The path out, Ingold says, is a line of wayfaring; the path back is a line of transport.

  As readers, we patiently follow a narrative, both the sequence of events and the string of sentences. Uncertain of where we’re heading, we are alternately absorbed in the moment; linking what we’re reading to what we’ve already read; and imagining what’s coming, or could be coming. We recalibrate with each turn in our reading that seems significant, each development that gives us a different sense of the whole. Opening a new book is like entering a stranger’s house. We inhabit the work; we’re actively engaged in it; we’re discovering it. Similarly, as writers, in the process of drafting, we may have a general goal—something that feels complete, or the exploration of some moment or event or character—but our pursuit of that goal usually involves a good deal of meandering. We are in search of something at least as elusive as reindeer.

  The serpentine line, or the line of grace, by its waving and winding its different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety.

  — William Hogarth

  When we reread, we tend to see each part of a story in terms of how it contributes to the whole; we’re more acutely aware of how the story accumulates, or makes sense. We’re more aware of a destination. Even when the work eludes us, or our rereading yields new discoveries, every reading after the first is influenced by our knowledge of what will and won’t happen. We know a good deal about where the path goes and where it ends.

  As writers, when we revise, especially if readers of a draft have expressed confusion or uncertainty about aspects of our story or poem, or if we worry that we’ve made the reader’s job too difficult, we might feel obliged to provide transport, to convey the reader efficiently from one point to the next. But while clarity can be a virtue, directness, reduction, and simplification don’t always serve the work, our own interests, or our readers’ deepest interests. If it seems perverse not to provide a reader with efficient transport, it might help to remember that, as early as the days of playing Chutes and Ladders, most people have gotten some pleasure from the tension caused by delays and obstruction, interruption of direct progress along a line.

  DOWN THE GARDEN PATH

  Guidelines for highly functional public pathways, best practices concerning width and slope and surface materials, are meant to promote safe and efficient movement from one point to another. But when a path is meant to create interest, or to provide a place for contemplation or relaxation, the rules change. Garden paths, for instance, are often intentionally narrow, to encourage the visitor to slow down; they curve and meander, ideally with part of the path hidden from sight, to create a sense of mystery and discovery. Even when a path needs to be straight, edges are obscured to soften the walkway, and surface materials are employed to stop us short, physically or visually.

  In the short segment of a path shown here, many things are being done to interrupt that straight line of “progress.” The orientation of the pavers in the foreground immediately makes us hesitate—while there’s no particular need to use them, our impulse is to step onto each of the turned squares. The space between and around the paving stones makes the path seem narrower, so makes us deliberate. The two slabs of stone that serve as the left side of the bridge seem perfectly solid, but there’s something unnerving about the fact that they stop short of the far bank. Again, there’s nothing especially precarious about this arrangement, but it’s unusual, and our brain tells us to hesitate, to assess. We see we’ll need to move to the right, and the two slabs on that side seem, oddly, to be balancing on just one support. We either worry about what we can’t see, or, based on the evidence of the slabs’ apparent stability, we trust that there are other supports out of sight. Then, after crossing, we confront a gate—ajar, inviting, but another barrier, a place to pause. For that matter, even before we move forward, the visual arrangement of materials encourages us to stop, to take in what’s ahead. One straight stretch of concrete would make it easier for us—even compel us—to hurry along. But getting to the end of this path is not the point. Everything about it tells us to slow down, to look around, to be engaged in a moment and a place. Similarly, even as fiction (or a book about fiction writing) promises to lead us somewhere, it encourages us to dwell in the moment, to inhabit our reading.

  St. Jerome in the Wilderness (detail), by Albrecht Dürer

  Not a line nor dot of Dürer’s can be displaced without harm. . . . All add to the effect, and either express something, or illumine something, or relieve something. . . . [In] modern tree drawings . . . though good and forcible general effect is produced, the lines are thrown in by thousands without special intention, and might just as well go one way as another, so only that there be enough of them to produce all together a well-shaped effect of intricacy: and you will find that a little careless scratching about with your pen will bring you very near the same result without an effort; but that no scratching of pen, nor any fortunate chance, nor anything but downright
skill and thought, will imitate so much as one leaf of Dürer’s. Yet there is considerable intricacy and glittering confusion in the interstices of those vine leaves of his, as well as of the grass.

  — John Ruskin

  THREADS AND TRACES

  In Lines: A Brief History, Tim Ingold separates lines into two general categories: threads and traces. A thread, he says, is “a filament . . . which may be entangled with other threads or suspended between points”: string, yarn, a spider’s webbing. Traces, in contrast, are “enduring marks left in or on a solid surface” by addition or reduction: ink on paper, symbols chiseled out of stone. Ingold points out that “linea . . . originally meant a thread made from flax . . . woven into cloth we now call linen.” The verb “to weave” in Latin was texere, the source of both “textile” and “text.” In writing, then, we use traces, or marks on a surface, to weave threads in a text.

  Weaving creates texture and draws things together. A large-scale example: in his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer weaves disparate tales, tellers, and storytelling styles together to create a work larger and richer than any one of the stories. Some might argue that the work maintains its place in our imaginations not despite the fact that it went unfinished but, in part, because it is unfinished—the loose threads invite us to imagine more. This is part of the appeal of fragments and ruins, but not all fragments are equally captivating. Chaucer’s plan for the work—the framework he created—and the richness and variety of the pieces he did complete are what inspire us to imagine the whole, and what have inspired others (in literary fiction, graphic novels, and even a book of puzzles) to imitate it.

  Within the completed tales we can see Chaucer’s awareness of the usefulness of drawing our attention to the weave. In the Knight’s Tale, for instance, after going on about Palamon, he has the knight tell us,

  Now will I cease (speaking) of Palamon for a little while,

  And leave him to dwell in his prison still,

  And of Arcite forth I will tell you.

  and

  They began to smite like wild boars,

  That froth at the mouth white as foam for mad anger.

  They fought up to the ankle in their blood.

  And in this manner I leave them to remain fighting,

  And forth I will tell you of Theseus.

  and

  But I will stop speaking of Theseus a little while,

  And speak of Palamon and of Arcite.

  and

  Now I will stop (speaking) of the gods above,

  Of Mars, and of Venus, goddess of love,

  And tell you as plainly as I can

  The essential part, for which I began.

  THE PARDONER’S PUZZLE

  The gentle Pardoner, “that straight was come from the court of Rome,” begged to be excused, but the company would not spare him. “Friends and fellow pilgrims,” said he, “of a truth the riddle that I have made is but a poor thing, but it is the best that I have been able to devise. Blame my lack of knowledge of such matters if it be not to your liking.” But his invention was very well received. He produced the accompanying plan and said that it represented sixty-four towns through which he had to pass during some of his pilgrimages, and the lines connecting them were roads. He explained that the puzzle was to start from the large black town and visit all the other towns once, and once only, in [a single pilgrimage consisting of fifteen straight lines]. Try to trace the route . . . with your pencil. You may end where you like, but note that the apparent omission of a little road at the bottom is intentional, as it seems it was impossible to go that way.

  — Henry Ernest Dudeney

  In each case, the Knight could simply stop talking about one character or scene and begin talking about the next. Instead, Chaucer deliberately draws our attention to severed threads, dropped lines, in order to create a sense of stories that could continue and stories that have already begun. In doing so, he actively encourages us to imagine a whole larger than what is on the page—something like the way those stone slabs extending nearly across the stream invite us to imagine another type of bridge. The rhetorical gesture creates the impression of interruption and digression, a sense that a narrative line has been abandoned or abruptly ended—though if he hadn’t drawn our attention to them, we would have thought the narrative to be unbroken. Often, fiction both draws us into a specifically depicted series of thoughts and events and encourages us to imagine more. For a contemporary example, see Anne Carson’s Nox, an elegy to her brother, which includes reproductions of partial documents and deliberately obscured and illegible text to convey both a sense of loss and the impossibility of fully comprehending the departed.

  PATTERN AND SURPRISE

  Is there such a thing as a linear story?

  There is; I’ve written one.

  The Box

  Once there was a boy who wanted a bike. One day a man knocked on the door. He was holding a box. It was a bike!

  Granted, I was five years old, but I think you’ll agree it shows promise. Note the expression of the character’s desire (clearly anticipating years of workshops in which someone would say, “But what does this guy want?”); note the economical shift from exposition into scene, and the deliberately withheld information about the secondary character. (What man? My father? No, my father had already vetoed the bike.) And then, in the third sentence, the introduction of suspense. If only I had stopped there . . .

  So: a pretty poor excuse for a story. The voyage from introduction to climax to (happy) catastrophe does not offer much to the reader. But there are fairly straightforward-seeming stories that have engaged readers, and those include fables and folktales. “Petie Pete versus Witch Bea-Witch,”30 from Italo Calvino’s landmark Italian Folktales, goes like this: Young Petie Pete is in a pear tree when he’s called by a witch, who asks him to hand her a pear. In fact, she wants to kidnap him, take him home, and eat him. Petie Pete falls for her devious ruse but then, through cunning, he escapes.

  That’s pretty much it. In summary, the tale doesn’t seem any more promising than “The Box.” In basic plot the narrative would seem to be depicted nicely by Freytag’s pyramid. At the outset, Petie Pete is, implicitly, enjoying himself in the pear tree (introduction). The witch appears, confronts him with her request and bad intent, and when he climbs down, pops Pete into a bag and takes him to her home, where her daughter will cook him (climax). In the final scene, Pete prevails over both the witch and her daughter (catastrophe). We can also identify rising and falling action—which is to say, if we want to pretend that “Petie Pete versus Witch Bea-Witch” is aptly illustrated by Freytag’s pyramid, we can. But that illustration of the basic story line, the essential sequence of events, does very little to help us understand why the story of Petie Pete has held listeners’ interest for over a century.

  The tale divides neatly into three sections. (1) Witch Bea-Witch convinces Petie Pete to come down from his tree and stuffs him into her bag, but when she stops to relieve herself, Petie Pete gnaws through the cord holding the bag shut and puts a large stone inside. When the witch gets home, she has her daughter heat water in their cauldron and opens her bag, only to find the rock. (2) Witch Bea-Witch goes back to the pear tree and again convinces Petie Pete to come down. Again, the witch stops to relieve herself; this time, Petie Pete finds the bag tied too tightly to gnaw his way out, so he attracts the attention of a quail hunter who happens to be passing by, and convinces the hunter to put his dog in the bag. At home, after her daughter heats the water, the witch opens the bag and the dog eats up their hens. (The attentive reader might wonder why the witch and her daughter don’t simply boil a chicken for dinner; but we might as well ask why the witch doesn’t treat her apparent urinary tract infection.) (3) The witch returns to the pear tree, persuades Petie Pete to come down, goes home with “no rest stops,” and shuts him up in the chicken coop. The next morning, Petie Pete fools the daughter and chops off her head. When the witch comes back, she sees Petie Pete on the hood above the f
ireplace; she tries to climb up after him, but falls into the fire and burns to ashes.

  Each of the three sections has the same three components: Petie Pete is approached by the witch, Petie Pete is fooled by the witch, and Petie Pete outwits the witch. Having something occur twice illustrates either simple repetition or contrast; having something happen three times creates pattern. Pattern creates anticipation. (In the film Groundhog Day, the first time we see Phil Connors, the TV weatherman played by Bill Murray, walk through Punxsutawney, we’re simply watching what happens; the second time, we’re understanding, along with the character, that he’s essentially reliving the same day, and that the people around him don’t know that; the third time he awakens to Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You, Babe,” we immediately begin to anticipate what might follow.)

  While it’s tempting to say that Petie Pete’s three sections each take the shape of Freytag’s pyramid, no one of them stands as a complete story; the three together are the story. The three sections escalate in tension and outcome. At the same time, they grow shorter, because we already know the essential situation; the teller of the tale can focus on the variation. In Italian Folktales, the first section is about a page and a third, the second slightly shorter, the third just half a page.