Jane Alison - Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

Table of Contents

My thanks above all to Nichole LeFebvre for her zealous hunting of texts and permissions and her constant engagement as this book found its way. Thanks to both Nichole and Helen Chandler for reading an early draft of this manuscript and making wise (and graceful) suggestions; to Ethan Feuer for creating such inventive illustrations; to the University of Virginia for research support; to all of my students who let me try ideas on them and gave many back; and to Emily Forland and to Pat Strachan, with her excellent team at Catapult.

ALSO BY JANE ALISON

Nine Island

The Love-Artist

The Marriage of the Sea

Natives and Exotics

The Sisters Antipodes

AS TRANSLATOR

Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid

Alexie, Sherman. Captivity.

. Superman and Me.

Bail, Murray. Eucalyptus.

Baker, Nicholson. The Mezzanine.

Carson, Anne. Nox.

Carver, Raymond. Why Dont You Dance?

. Where Im Calling From.

Chandra, Vikram. Shakti.

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street.

Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. Translated by Barbara Bray.

Dybek, Stuart. Pet Milk.

Garca Mrquez, Gabriel. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Translated by Gregory Rabassa.

Johnson, B. S. The Unfortunates.

Kincaid, Jamaica. Mr. Potter.

Lin, Tao. Shoplifting from American Apparel.

Lispector, Clarice. The Fifth Story. Translated by Katrina Dodson.

Markson, David. Wittgensteins Mistress.

Minot, Susan. Lust.

Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita.

. Speak, Memory.

Nors, Dorthe. Days. Translated by Misha Hoekstra.

Oates, Joyce Carol. Black Water.

Phillips, Caryl. Crossing the River.

Redonnet, Marie. Htel Splendid. Translated by Jordan Stump.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Translated by Richard Howard.

Robison, Mary. Why Did I Ever.

Roth, Philip. Goodbye, Columbus.

Salarru (Luis Salvador Efran Salazar Arru). We Bad. Translated by Thomas Christensen.

Sebald, W. G. The Emigrants. Translated by Michael Hulse.

Torres, Justin. Reverting to a Wild State.

Wallace, David Foster. Forever Overhead.

Wolff, Tobias. Bullet in the Brain.

. The Barracks Thief.

SECONDARY TEXTS MENTIONED

Aristotle, Poetics.

Ball, Philip. Patterns in Nature.

Barton, Simon. Visual Devices in Contemporary Prose Fiction.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot.

Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Dillon, Millicent. Symposium on W. G. Sebald, The Threepenny Review.

Eagleton, Terry. The English Novel: An Introduction.

Frank, Joseph. Spatial Form in Modern Literature.

Freytag, Gustav. The Technique of the Drama.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction.

Gu, Ming Dong. Chinese Theories of Fiction: A Non-Western Narrative System.

Harris, James. Fractal Architecture.

Homer. Odyssey.

Jirousek, Charlotte. Art, Design, and Visual Thinking.

Krauth, Nigel. The Concept of the Radical in Writing.

Kuzmiov, Aneka. Literary Narrative and Mental Imagery: A View from Embodied Cognition.

Marcus, Ben. Introduction to The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories.

Moore, Dinty. Positively Negative.

Richardson, Brian, ed. Narrative Dynamics.

. Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction.

Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction.

Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative.

Smitten, Jeffrey R., and Ann Daghistany, eds. Spatial Form in Narrative.

Solares, Martin. How to Draw a Novel.

Sophocles. Oedipus.

Stevens, Peter. Patterns in Nature.

Sukenick, Ronald. The New Tradition in Fiction.

Voigt, Ellen Bryant. The Art of Syntax.

White, Glyn. Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction.

Williams, Florence. The Nature Fix.

Winnett, Susan. Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure.

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Excerpts from Eucalyptus by Murray Bail. Copyright 1998 by Murray Bail. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Excerpts from Eucalyptus by Murray Bail. Copyright 1998 by Murray Bail. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Canada/Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

Where Im Calling From from Cathedral by Raymond Carver, copyright 1981, 1982, 1983 by Tess Gallagher. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from The Lover by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray, translation copyright 1985 by Penguin Random House LLC and William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Pet Milk from The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek. Copyright 1990 by Stuart Dybek. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Excerpts from Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garca Mrquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa, translation copyright 1982 by Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Gabriel Garca Mrquez, excerpt from Crnica de una Muerte Anunciada by Gabriel Garca Mrquez, 1981, and Heirs of Gabriel Garca Mrquez.

Excerpts from The Fifth Story by Clarice Lispector. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Excerpts from Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates, copyright 1993 by The Ontario Review Inc. Used by permission of Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips. Copyright 1992 by Caryl Phillips. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips. Published by Vintage, 1994. Copyright by Caryl Phillips. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.

Excerpts reproduced from Htel Splendid by Marie Redonnet, translated by Jordan Stump, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Originally published as Splendid Htel, copyright 1986 by Les ditions de Minuit. Translation copyright 1994 by the University of Nebraska Press.

Why Did I Ever. Copyright 2001 by Mary Robison. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

Excerpts from Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. Copyright 1959, renewed 1987 by Philip Roth. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpts by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse, from The Emigrants, copyright 1992 by Vito von Eichborn GmbH Verlag KG, copyright 1999 by The Harvill Press. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The Barracks Thief. Copyright 1984 by Tobias Wolff. Reprinted by permission of ICM Partners.

Excerpts from pp. 11, 30, 60, 7576, 97, and 101 from