Revisiting the deconstruction of narratology: master tropes of narrative embedding and symmetry

Style, Spring, 2001 by James J. Paxson

The historical provenance of ring composition, a narrative master trope in its own right, depends on the rhetorical trope chiasmus. Van Otterlo, Whitman, and H. Ward Tonsfeldt acknowledged the structural dependence of ring composition on the Homeric formula long called hysteron proteron, or "last first." (Whitman in fact preferred the cumbersome Hellenic term to "ring" or "frame.") Again, this was a feature of Homer's poetry well noted by Aristarchus of Samothrace. Hermogenes of Tarsus, the most eminent rhetorician of the second century, in turn employed the rhetorical term chiasmus for the first time to designate symmetrical syntax characteristic of Homeric poetry and public oratory. Hermogenes seized on the metaphorical idea of a "crossing over" in two syntactical units made up of four interchangeable and grammatically parallel clauses. (7) Thus, the Greek letter chi, chiasmus, "X." Ring analysts now automatically refer to their discovered patterns as '"chiastic" or "chiasmic." Conveniently, the graphic ma rk called chi or x has a symmetrical shape: it looks like two conjoined but inverted arrowheads aligned either axially or laterally.

Rings, frames, boxes, globes, Xs--geometrical metaphors notwithstanding, (8) the very literal and real formal containment of narrative embedding so closely resembles the often imagined or figurative containment of ring composition that the structural underpinnings of the two effects need to be made more apparent. Although it is primarily the phenomenology of temporal lineation "through" both kinds of nested structures that enables this resemblance, it must also be remembered that both ring composition and narrative embedding, as when Whitman compares them to chiasmus and Todorov compares them to grammatical embedding in Indo-European sentences, can be taken as enantiomorphisms of localized syntax. Because this latter process captures the spirit of high structuralism at its fullest (from Chomsky to Todorov's grammatization of narrative), it should urge us to press for a requisite deconstruction. If one problem with the structuralist projection of syntax into the larger domain of narrative is the coopting or fa ilure of correspondence and symmetry dictated by such an exercise from the start, then another problem is that the symmetrical placement of an included object in a circumscribing or englobing object also fails, for it marks from the start a fantasy of harmonic order never realizable owing to the pull of the metafigural language governing the whole process of formalization. Such impossibility--capturing the nature of verbal objects using nothing more than riddlingly figurated language in the first place--has always been the hallmark of deconstructive thought.

In any event, it might be vaguely evident by now how narrative embedding, which I will call "para-antimetabole," can be understood as a categorical subset of metabolic or chiasmic ring composition. In ring composition, any variety of categorical imperatives organizes a putative "ring": themes, recurring words, appearances of particular character or settings, and so on. Because the organizing or categorical logic can be terribly loose and free, ring analysis at times appears silly to more exacting formalists. If characters or narrative agents who reappear in a story's linear syntagm are so disposed symmetrically--say, FBI Agent Mulder alone and lost in the woods in an episode's opening and closing scenes, and Agent Scully alone and lost in a building in a second and a penultimate scene--then we seem to have an inclusio, a case of symmetrical englobement or emboxment or ring composition based on themes of locality. But what such characters do in these scenes can have further determinations. So, if the narrative action or theme in those scenes, symmetrically tricked out or not, is narration--say, Jose Chung writing at his mechanical typewriter in opening and closing scenes; Mulder telling a story to Chung in the second scene; then an abductee telling Mulder a story in the third scene; and so on--then, by way of a typically implied closure to any of those scenes of narrating, we have symmetry and thus a kind of ring composition. Simply by being "inside" a framing story-level, an endodiegesis or metadiegesis splits or separates that frame into the imagined involutions of a diegetic "ring." All reasonably symmetrical or correspondentially embedded narratives can be said to be rings, themselves structural effects generated from metabolic or chiasmic syntactical structures.