by Peter Turchi
As retold by Calvino, the tale invokes other threes. In the first section, the witch calls to Petie Pete three times. The first two times he throws her a pear; the third time he hands it to her, and she snatches him up. The first time he throws a pear, it lands where “a cow had . . . deposited one of its mementos”; the second time, it lands where “a horse had . . . left a big puddle”; after she ties Petie Pete into her bag, the witch stops to relieve herself. In the first section, the witch presumably has black hair; in the second, she disguises herself by wearing a blond wig; in the third, she disguises herself by wearing a red wig. The witch’s incantatory request—“Petie Pete, pass me a pear / With your little paw! / I mean it, don’t guffaw, / My mouth waters, I swear, I swear,” is repeated three times; and so on. While some of these details are related to the tale’s plot, the primary purpose of this patterning is to provide texture or surface interest; and the abundance of it helps explain why Calvino said the Italian folktale is characterized by “grace, wit, and unity of design.”
The story doesn’t simply keep breaking into thirds. It also alternates between prose and verse, as the characters often speak in rhyming couplets or quatrains. And we can’t overlook the Looney Tunes logic of the characters: Witch Bea-Witch is intent on eating Petie Pete—never mind the fact that she has a yard full of chickens. Petie Pete understands from the outset that the witch wants to eat him, but when she repeats her request for a pear a third time, we’re told “he found it wiser to comply.” Why? This story answers no whys. The second time the witch confronts him, all we’re told is that “she kept on until she finally talked Petie Pete into coming down.” The third time, “She went on at such length that Petie Pete fell into the trap once more.” Petie Pete may be clever, but he also appears to be an idiot. Lucky for him, Maggy Mag, the witch’s daughter, is apparently related to Wile E. Coyote: on the verge of chopping off the boy’s head, she says “Petie Pete, just for fun, / Please lay your head upon this board”; when he says “First show me how,” she does. Poor decision. The basic conflict—the witch’s bad intent and Petie Pete’s desire for self-preservation—makes perfect sense. Within that conflict, the character’s actions and responses are nonsensical, unpredictable, and comic.
Repetition creates anticipation; surprise creates uncertainty. By combining the two, this little tale produces both forward momentum and tension. It’s important to note that the characters’ “logic” has no answer—it’s never explained. In fact, the story ends with a bit of nonsense: Petie Pete sits on the hood above the fireplace, the witch asks how he got there, and somehow she falls from a stack of pans and burns to death in her fireplace. She might just as easily have fallen into a well, or been shot by a passing quail hunter. While the basic plot might seem as straightforward as the plot of “The Box,” this irrationality provides a quavering strangeness, a kind of mystery. At the same time, our basic expectation is satisfied, as young Petie Pete prevails.
Again: can Freytag’s pyramid be found in this folktale? Sure. But to see the tale as an illustration of that pyramid at work overlooks virtually everything that makes it interesting.
The Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky said that the fundamental elements of painting are the point and the line. In Point and Line to Plane, he says the point “represents the briefest, constant, innermost assertion.” He explains the importance of size and placement of the point, and demonstrates how a dancer’s leap can be expressed as a “five-pointed plane.”
The line, Kandinsky goes on to say, “is the track made by the moving point.” A point has no direction; it becomes a line when one or more forces are applied. So: Petie Pete in the pear tree is at rest; he is a point; he is silent. That point turns to a line when force is applied—when the ill-intentioned witch makes her request.
Rhythm, Kandinsky says, is created through repetition of the line. His examples, below, illustrate repetition at equal intervals, repetition at uniformly increasing intervals, and repetition in unequal intervals.
The basic action of “Petie Pete versus Witch Bea-Witch” could, then, be described in terms of a line—the witch’s encounter with Petie Pete—repeated at uniformly increasing intervals. In Kandinsky’s terms, the repeated elements in each of those encounters provide both quantitative and qualitative reinforcement—the exact repetition is quantitative, the gradual changes are qualitative. If each section of the tale reminds us of Freytag’s pyramid, we might illustrate the entire narrative like this:
Or, to recognize that each of the first two episodes resolves that episode but not the story,
But that would still account only for the essential action, and not for the other elements that make the story memorable.
Kandinsky classifies lines as straight or curved. A straight line, he says, is the result of a single force being applied to a point; a curved line results from two forces being applied simultaneously. A straight line can be redirected to form angles, or zigzags, and a curved line can change direction as the forces applied to it change. A painting can be composed of both straight and curved lines.
The straight-lined angles in the illustration above represent the three encounters between Petie and the witch. We need a curved line to represent the curious, surprising, and comic logic of the characters. The curved line overlaps the straight lines, as the basic events and the characters’ surprising actions and responses are simultaneous—and it’s the combination of the familiar, repeated action and the unique details of Petie’s interactions with the witch that make the tale distinct. Kandinsky says the “contrasting combination of a curved line with an angular line [results in] the characteristics of both [acquiring] a strengthened sound.”
The predictability and anticipation of a repetitive structure as well as the repetition of detail, with variation, combines with an ongoing chain of unpredictable elements. On their own, neither the tidy, nearly symmetrical structure nor the apparently random and inexplicable actions and decisions would be as effective.
We see—or hear—something similar in music all the time. We happily sing a song whose refrain includes the syllables “Goo goo ga joob” in part because the sounds of the words and syllables give us pleasure, in part because the music is so rhythmic and melodic that we are carried along by the nonverbal qualities of the song. We accept this combination of rigid pattern (especially in popular music, but to some extent in virtually all music) and surface irregularity. Children accept, even delight in, some degree of nonsense; the reading habits of adults sometimes veer dangerously to the reductive. As writers, we have the opportunity to remind readers of the pleasure that can come from not knowing and from partial understanding: the pleasure of mystery. Despite the familiarity of its basic story—clever boy outwits witch, or hero outwits oafish bully (think Odysseus and the Cyclops), “Petie Pete” ultimately illustrates not simplicity but the kind of complexity at work in most satisfying fiction.
MAZE OR LABYRINTH?
While some board games complicate the route from beginning to end, others have neither a beginning nor an end—and some do away with the route. Progress is measured by other means. In Monopoly, players could, theoretically, make infinite loops around Atlantic City accumulating wealth, though the game’s constraints are designed to put an end to things, eventually: (a) each trip becomes more hazardous as rents increase, (b) players are required to continue moving around the board, which becomes a financial minefield to the extent that being incarcerated can come as a relief, and (c) the money supply is limited. Clue has its own rules for the way tokens may be moved on the board, but players are like wayfarers, heading off to various locations to try to determine who killed poor Mr. Boddy, where, and by what means.31 The goal isn’t to follow a path so much as to explore a space, making Clue a precursor to many video games. Rather than reach a finish line, or the square numbered 100 in Chutes and Ladders, players are trying to obtain information. While Clue is referred to as a murder mystery, by our definition it’s a puzzle players compete to solve. The nu
mber of rooms, suspects, and weapons is limited, and these constraints combine with the rules of the game to ensure that the solution can be deduced.
As readers, we move through a story identifying significant information, accumulating understanding about characters and events. While in some cases the focus of the story is apparent from the outset, in others the challenge is intensified by the fact that, on first reading, we don’t know what we’re looking for: we can see where we’re starting, but we don’t know where we’re headed. In this way, certain stories are like mazes: the characters, events, images and information we’re given offer a variety of possible routes, and as we read we realize that some end, others are less likely to be pursued, while still others continue to lead us forward. This is complicated by the fact that stories accumulate meaning in a variety of ways: so while we might identify one or more main characters fairly quickly, and the importance of some scenes and actions will be clear immediately, the significance of various gestures, speeches, images, and metaphors may become evident only gradually. The reader is Theseus in the labyrinth, unspooling thread in order to find his way out of what he’s getting himself into.
While Alice Munro is regarded by many as one of the greatest living short-story writers, and she recently received the Nobel Prize in Literature, some readers have trouble appreciating her work. Those readers find her stories confusing: without clear direction, without emphatic conclusion. Her stories seem to be about something, as Allen Grossman said about poetry, the way a cat is about a house. Chekhov tells us not to look to artists for answers to life’s problems, but readers who struggle with Munro’s work sometimes have trouble identifying the question.
Even more than most literary writers, Munro is less interested in transporting us from a beginning to an ending than she is interested in encouraging us to dwell. This doesn’t mean her stories are shapeless or pointless; far from it. But Freytag’s pyramid is not the best tool to use to understand how her stories work. In her case, it might be more helpful to think of a story as a labyrinth.
To refresh your memory: In Greek mythology, King Minos made an error in judgment and, as a result, his wife gave birth to a creature half-man, half-bull: the Minotaur. Minos had Daedalus design and build a labyrinth to encage the beast. Each year, the seven most courageous young men and seven most beautiful young women of Athens were sent in, sacrificed to the monster. Theseus, an Athenian with a good track record of setting things straight, volunteered to descend into the labyrinth and kill the Minotaur—the problem then being to make his way back out, as even Daedalus had trouble finding his way free. As luck would have it, Ariadne, King Minos’s daughter, fell in love with Theseus and passed along two bits of advice from Daedalus. The first was that Theseus should tie one end of a skein of thread to the door as he entered, and unravel the rest as he traveled. The second was to go forward and down, never left or right. Theseus famously slew the beast and found his way out of the labyrinth. After that, in most versions of the myth, things go south: in one, he marries Ariadne but they’re unhappy; in another, he discovers Ariadne was already married; in another, he unaccountably forgets about her and sails back to Athens. The story has been retold in various ways over a very long time in part because it is metaphorically potent. We have all journeyed into the darkness, we have all grasped for the threads that will help us find our way; and the biggest challenges seem to require going further into the dark, complex, threatening unknown.
A labyrinth: elaborate, time-consuming, with changes of direction difficult to predict if you’re walking in it, but a single path, with no possible wrong turns.
While the terms “labyrinth” and “maze” are often used interchangeably, some reserve “labyrinth” to refer to a single (albeit indirect) path that leads, eventually, to one destination, and “maze” to refer to a branching puzzle with choices of path and direction. This is a useful distinction: a maze confronts us with choices, a labyrinth is intricate but well-defined. Unfortunately, under those definitions, Daedalus’s creation was a maze. Adding to the confusion: if all Theseus needed to do was go forward and down, why the thread? A labyrinth is elaborate but not difficult to follow. All that’s required is patience. One can easily get lost in a maze.
It may be impossible to talk about labyrinthine fiction without acknowledging that the term was much used by and is often used about the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, some of whose work was collected in a volume titled Labyrinths and whose stories included “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths” and “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Borges’s labyrinth was a world of infinite possibilities, one where a library could contain every existing book and every possible book, where imagined worlds had direct influence on real worlds, and where the very notion of “reality” was vigorously in play. But here I’d like to consider the way a less allusive and less self-referential narrative can be labyrinthine, leading the reader forward in ways that are not always immediately discernible to an end that might be difficult to identify.
A maze: finding the correct path requires frequent decision-making.
In Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature,32 Espen J. Aarseth cites scholar Penelope Reed Doob, who “distinguishes between two kinds of labyrinthine structure: the unicursal, where there is only one path, winding and turning, usually toward a center; and the multicursal, where the maze wanderer faces a series of critical choices.”33 Aarseth goes on to say: “In the Renaissance, however, the idea of the labyrinth, both in literature and visual art, was reduced to the multicursal paradigm that we recognize today. Consequently, the old metaphor of the text as labyrinth, which in medieval poetics could signify both a difficult, winding, but potentially rewarding linear process and a spatial, artistically complex, and confusing artifact, was restricted to the latter sense.” Here we’ll reclaim that old metaphor and examine the “difficult, winding, [and] potentially rewarding process” of a narrative that takes us on a journey that often has us wondering about the nature of our destination.
Mazes can be traced back at least 2,500 years, and have often been associated with great spiritual power and with the underworld. Some prehistoric labyrinths are thought to have been designed to trap evil beings or spirits, while other labyrinths appeared on church walls and floors as symbolic pilgrimages. Labyrinths are sometimes used for meditation, the physical journey representing an emotional, psychological, or intellectual one. In Arizona I lived near the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, so routinely passed buildings and gateways bearing the community’s Great Seal. The Great Seal features a version of an ancient image, often seen as a petroglyph, on pottery and in baskets, that depicts a figure standing at the opening of a winding path.
A maze drawn by Lewis Carroll. The object is to move from the inner diamond to the exterior. The successful path can go under and above other paths, but a line drawn across a path blocks the way. If you find this maze less than aesthetically pleasing, it might be useful to think about why. What makes one maze engagingly complex and another simply annoying? What does a writer need to do to lure a reader into, and through, a “difficult” book?
The “Man in the Maze,” or house of “Se-eh-ha,” represents the choices one makes along the journey of life, including, in turns, happiness and sadness, successes and failures. According to legend, the center represents the culmination of dreams and goals in a meeting with the Sun God before the passage to the next life. Other cultures use similar designs to illustrate the journey outward, with birth at the center. The universality of the spiral—one of the most common petroglyphs world-wide—and the maze, over millennia, suggests that, in contrast to the straight lines and simple angles of Aristotle and Freytag, many people believe a curving or indirect path best describes the stories of our lives.
Which brings us back to Alice Munro. If her story “Royal Beatings” is a labyrinth, it’s not because she wants us to feel lost or confused. She means to lead us somewhere, but the route is indirect. The heart of her stories is often somew
here in the center, and while we’re on our journey it can be difficult to comprehend the whole—the hedges are too high for us to see over, the turns too unpredictable. But this doesn’t mean her stories are disorganized or that we can’t, once we’ve finished them, perceive their shape.
“Royal Beatings” is typical of Munro’s work in that while it offers the reader at least one central subject, or primary conflict, it is much less interested in illustrating that conflict, or resolving it, than in exploring it.
A brief outline of the story might look like this:
1. We’re introduced to the term “royal beatings” and to the main characters: Rose, Flo (Rose’s stepmother), and Rose’s father.
2. We learn that Rose’s mother died when she was very young.
3. We learn more about Flo, particularly that she’s a gossip.
4. We learn more about Rose’s father, a furniture repairman, who in some ways seemed mysterious to both Flo and Rose.
5. We learn that while the family was poor, they were able to install an indoor bathroom.
6. We meet Becky Tyde, “a big-headed loud-voiced dwarf” who had polio as a child. We see her talking with Flo in a scene set in an unspecified time.
7. We’re told that Becky’s father beat her and her siblings, and there was a rumor that her father had impregnated her and “disposed of” the child. Later, three men were hired by “more influential and respectable men” to give Becky’s father a horse-whipping; they beat him so badly that he died as he tried to leave town.
8. We learn more about Rose and Flo: the way Flo talks and dresses, Rose’s earliest memories of her, and what Rose imagines of Flo’s life before Flo married her father.