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Ring Composition: Some Notes on a Particular Literary Morphology William L. Benzon Version 3, September 11, 2017 Abstract: Ring-composition is an ancient way of ordering narratives, but it exists in a variety of modern texts as well. Mary Douglas has identified seven criteria for recognizing narrati...

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Ring Composition: Some Notes on a Particular Literary Morphology Bill Benzon

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To J. Hillis Miller, 2019: On t he St at e of Lit erary Crit icism Bill Benzon Abst ract Pat t erns in St ories: From t he int ellect ual legacy of David G. Hays Bill Benzon Not es on At t ridge and St at en: T he Craft of Poet ry Bill Benzon

Ring Composition: Some Notes on a Particular Literary Morphology William L. Benzon Version 3, September 11, 2017 Abstract: Ring-composition is an ancient way of ordering narratives, but it exists in a variety of modern texts as well. Mary Douglas has identified seven criteria for recognizing narrative rings: 1) exposition or prologue, 2) split into two halves, 3) parallel sections, 4) indicators to mark individual sections, 5) central loading. 6) rings within rings, and 7) closure at two levels. I analyze a variety of texts according to those criteria (“Kubla Khan,” Metropolis, Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now), introduce the notion of center point construction as a weakened, and therefor more general, form of ring composition, and discuss ring-composition in relation to a computational model of mental behavior. Introduction: Rings and Narratives ................................................................................................................... 1 The Ring-Form Challenge ....................................................................................................................................... 6 Dylan Thomas constructs a Wonderful chiasmus .................................................................................... 10 Center Point Construction: Coleridge, Tezuka, Conrad, and Coppola .............................................. 18 Center Point Construction: Description and Objectivity ....................................................................... 30 Center Point Construction and the Computational Mind ...................................................................... 37 Ring Form, A Computational Approach ........................................................................................................ 43 Ring Composition in Alan Liu’s Essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” ....................... 49 The Disciple Revisited and Revived ................................................................................................................ 53 Appendix 1: Jakobson’s Poetic Function and Literary Form ................................................................ 60 Appendix 2: Gojira, a Ring Form Analysis .................................................................................................... 61 Appendix 3: Gojira, Analytical Table: What Happens and When ....................................................... 66

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Introduction: Rings and Narratives I first learned about ring form composition in a 1976 article by R. G. Peterson, “Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature” (PMLA 91, 3: 367-375), which I probably read when it was originally published. By ring Peterson meant texts having this kind of form, often known as chiasmus: A, B, … X … B’, A’ OR A, B, … X, X’, … B’, A’ Peterson was reporting on a literature that was two decades old by that time, though it was mostly about classical and biblical texts. Beyond verifying the chiasmus in Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue”, however, I did nothing with the article. I simply filed the topic away in my mind. It wasn’t until early in this millennium, after the publication of Beethoven’s Anvil, that I put ring composition on my own agenda. The late Mary Douglas had been kind enough to blurb the book and my editor put me in touch with her after it was published. In the course of our correspondence she asked me if I had any ideas about how the brain might achieve ring forms. She was interested in ring forms because she thought they were somehow fundamental to the human mind. Here’s an entry from my notes at the time: The most interesting aspect of ring-composition is the inverse order requirement. Why do I think that? Because it places the most "stress" on the brain's equipment. Consider the alphabet. School children spend hours learning to recite the alphabet. But the fact that you've learned it doesn't mean that you can recite it in reverse order. That requires further practice. The brain's standard procedure for memorizing lists (whatever it is) is unidirectional. In contrast, once the alphabet has been written down, it is a trivial matter to read it in either direction. The eyes scan right to left as easily as left to right, bottom to top as easily as top to bottom. So, just how is it that ring forms arise? It’s one thing to have a chiasmus that spans a short time period, such as that at the end of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 – “this the world well knows yet none knows well…” – but how do we do such a thing for a much longer span? My initial thought, though, was that the navigation system might produce ring forms. Consider what happens when you leave home for some purpose at some other place and then return by the same route. For example, Mary goes to the grocer to buy a bottle of milk: 1) Mary leaves home. 2) She walks past the oak tree. 3) She walks past the post box. 4) She arrives at the grocery store. 5) She opens the door and enters. 6) She nods to the cashier. 7) She gets a bottle of milk from the cooler. 6’) She pays the cashier for the milk. 5’) She exits through the door.

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4’) She walks away from the grocery store. 3’) She walks past the post box. 2’) She walks past the oak tree. 1’) Mary arrives home. That’s a canonical ring form, with the departure from and arrival back home being the first and last elements in the ring and the purchase of the bottle of milk being the mid-point. The events in the tale are arrayed symmetrically about the mid-point. Given that many tales take the form of journeys perhaps the navigation system is indeed behind some ring-form tales. But only perhaps. As much as I’ve pondered possible mechanisms, most of my own work has been in analyzing and describing ring-forms in relatively recent texts, as opposed to the classical and biblical texts that are the traditional province of the subject. Moreover, last year I was contacted by John Granger,1 who has written a number of books on the Harry Potter series. He'd learned about Mary Douglas's work on ring composition and had determined that each of the Harry Potter books is a ring and that the series as a whole is a ring. As I've not read the books I have no opinion about whether or not he's right, but it's certainly possible. He’s written a book on the subject: Harry Potter as Ring Composition and Ring Cycle.2 Granger has also argued that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is ring composed3 and so is Around the World in Eighty Days.4 He's sent me a document in which he describes ring composition in Robert Louis Steven's Kidnapped. I may have read Kidnapped years ago, but I've not read either Frankenstein or Around the World in Eighty Days and so I haven’t verified his claims. But I have no a priori reason to question his work for my own work has revealed the existence of ring composition in quite recent texts, for example, Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis from 1949 and, in film, several of the episodes of Walt Disney’s Fantasia and Ishiro Honda’s Gojira, from 1954. Moreover, I have recently, and almost accidentally, discovered ring composition in a non-fiction work, an essay by literary critic Alan Liu, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.” I would also mention a post by film critic, David Bordwell, in which he discussed ring-like embeddings: Chinese Boxes, Russian Dolls, and Hollywood Movies.5 I hesitate to offer an opinion as to how prevalent ring-form texts might be. But, on the whole, I am inclined to believe that there are many out there just waiting to be identified as such.

The Posts The Ring-Form Challenge: This is a call to arms, or at any rate a call for help. I summarize Douglas’s characterization of ring composition and mention two examples from my own work, Heart of Darkness, and Metropolis. Dylan Thomas constructs a Wonderful chiasmus: The “Author’s Prologue” to Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems is 102 lines long and has a ring-form (chiasmus) rhyme scheme. I 1 http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/johngranger/ 2 http://www.lulu.com/shop/john-granger/harry-potter-as-ring-composition-and-ring-

cycle/paperback/product-13042044.html 3 http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/alchemy-ring-writing-doppelgangers-and-arabian-nights-the-

artistry-and-meaning-of-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/ 4 http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/21-december-or-1221-around-the-world-in-eight-days-day/ 5 http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2011/06/06/chinese-boxes-russian-dolls-and-hollywood-

movies/



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demonstrate that and show that the ring-form mirroring applies to line length as well. We know Thomas did this with conscious intention because we possess a typescript with lines numbered running forward to the middle and then reversing to the end. Center Point Construction: Coleridge, Tezuka, Conrad, and Coppola: Center point construction is my own notion, and is a weakened kind of ring. I was driven to the notion by my work on Heart of Darkness, which has a very strong, and strongly marked center section that functions as the center of a ring in Douglas’s characterization. But I couldn’t bring myself to force a strong parallel analysis on the ordering of incidents before and after that center, though the very last episode echoes the very first in that it closes the frame. This center loading gives these texts an affinity to strict rings and I believe they should be studied on that basis. In addition to Heart of Darkness I discuss Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Tezuka’s Metropolis, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. I score each text against the seven criteria Douglas set forth for ring composition. I also introduce the notion of an emblem, an image that somehow characterizes the whole, as each of these texts has sucn an image. Center Point Construction: Description and Objectivity: But are these things real or are you just reading them into the texts? They’re real, and I explain why I believe that. In particular, I note that comparing texts to one another is methodologically indispensible in identifying the joints of textual forms. Center Point Construction and the Computational Mind: I discuss Douglas’s criteria in the context of a computational model of mental processing, arguing that each of them has a plausible interpretation in such a model. Ring Form, A Computational Approach: I try out the notion of a computer program as a model for what’s going on in these texts. I consider two examples, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Fantasia and Apocalypse Now. Ring Composition in Alan Liu’s Essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”: Unlike all the other texts I’ve considered, this one is not a work of fiction. And yet it exhibits ringcomposition. Perhaps the form is more general than we’ve realized. The Disciple Revisited and Revived: This is a specific example, “To a Solitary Disciple,” by William Carlos Williams. Actually, I’m not quite sure that this is a ring, and say so. Thus it nicely illustrates the problems one encounters when undertaking the pedestrian business of simply describing the form of a literary texts. Appendix 1: Jakobson’s Poetic Function and Literary Form: Jakobson’s poetic function is a principle of literary form. Ring-composition may be considered to be a realization of the poetic function. Appendix 2: Gojira, a Ring Form Analysis: This is another specific example, the 1954 Japanese film, Gojira, which came to America in a butchered version called Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I did the analytic work on this film after I’d written all of the posts in this working paper and so it isn’t included in the comparative post, Center Point Construction: Coleridge, Tezuka, Conrad, and Coppola. For what it’s worth, I wasn’t looking for ring composition when began working on this film. The possibility that Gojira exhibited ring-



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form occurred only after I’d been working on the text for awhile and was deep into the construction of the analytical table, which I’ve also appended. Appendix 3: Gojira, Analytical Table: What Happens and When: A straightforward tabular depiction of what happens in the film from beginning to end. It was in examining this table that I discovered that Gojira exhibited ring-form.

Analytic and Descriptive Work on Ring-Form Texts For the most part, the posts I’ve gathered in this working paper only summarize analytical work I’ve done elsewhere. Here are the sources of that work. “Kubla Khan” STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind http://ssrn.com/abstract=2352455 “Kubla Khan” and the Embodied Mind, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November 29, 2003. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1588162 Metropolis Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan. In Timothy Perper and Martho Cornog, eds. Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World. Libraries Unlimited, 2011, pp. 37-51. Tezuka’s Metropolis: A Modern Japanese Fable about Art and the Cosmos. In Uta Klein, Katja Mellmann, Steffanie Metzger, eds. Heurisiken der Literaturwissenschaft: Disciplinexterne Perspektiven auf Literatur. mentis Verlag GmbH, 2006, pp. 527-545. https://www.academia.edu/7959634/Tezukas_Metropolis_A_Modern_Japanese_Fable_abo ut_Art_and_the_Cosmos Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now From Heart of Darkness to Apocalypse Now http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/11/from-heart-of-darkness-to-apocalypsenow.html Lévi-Strauss and Contemporary Myth: Heart of Apocalypse http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/12/levi-strauss-and-contemporary-myth.html Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales http://ssrn.com/abstract=1910279 Apocalypse Now: Working Papers. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1883826 Fantasia: Nutcracker Suite, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Pastoral Symphony Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/12/two-rings-in-fantasia-nutcracker-and.html Pastoral 5: Ring Form Construction http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/11/pastoral-5-ring-form-construction.html

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Episode Order in Fantasia: Revealing the Human Mind http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/08/episode-order-in-fantasia-revealing.html Gojira I have collected my work on this film into a working paper: The Gojira iPapers https://www.academia.edu/7905287/The_Gojira_Papers * * * * * Lastly, any New Savanna post on ring forms bears the “ring-form” label, making them all available at this link: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ring-form



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The Ring-Form Challenge The challenge is simple: for any given text – poem, drama, novel, film, what have you – is it a ring or not? That is, does it have the form: A, B, … X … B’, A’ OR A, B, … X, X’, … B’, A’ The question seems fairly straightforward, and, yes, the QUESTION is. But answering it may not be. I speak from experience. Note that the question is about form, not meaning, and that answering the question requires that you describe the text, not that you figure out what it means. You will, however, have to pay attention to meaning to determine, say, whether or not two elements function in parallel. But comparing the meanings of elements within a text is quite different from translating meanings into some theoretical discourse. I think we need to know, for any text we wish to study, whether or not it has a ring form. And if not a ring, then what? Why should we know this? Because form is important, it guides our apprehension of the text. What I REALLY think is that if enough people set out in search of ring forms, by the time, say, that a 100 new ring form texts have been identified, a new mode of literary study will be emerging, one that can be commensurate with the new psychologies, but which is not subordinate to any other discipline or body of knowledge.

Mary Douglas on Rings The study of ring forms is not new. I first learned about ring forms in a 1976 article in PMLA: R. G. Peterson, Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature (PMLA 91, 3: 367-375). He was reporting on a literature that was two decades old by that time, though it was mostly about classical and biblical texts. Beyond verifying the chiasmus in Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue”, however, I did nothing with the article. I simply filed the topic away in my mind. I didn’t begin to think about rings until Mary Douglas brought them to my attention earlier in the decade. She had been kind enough to blurb my book – Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture – and my editor put me in touch with her after the book came out. She’d been working on the topic for some time and had published books on two Old Testament texts: Leviticus As Literature (Oxford 1999), In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (Oxford 2001). She believed that rings are fundamental to human thought. She traveled to Yale in the fall of 2003 to deliver the Terry Lectures, which she devoted to rings (audio online6). Four years later Yale published those lectures in a slim volume: Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition, Yale University Press, 2007. As one would expect, she talked about ancient texts – Iliad, the Old Testament – but also Agatha Christie and Tristram Shandy. I think her argument on Tristram Shandy is a bit of a stretch, but I haven’t read the text in years and there are other things I find more pressing than verifying or refuting her 6 http://www.yale.edu/terrylecture/douglas.html



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argument about that text, which, obviously, is a very important one. I do however think that it would be possible for the profession to reach agreement on that matter, though doing so might not be as straightforward as those simple schemas at the top of this post would suggest. You’d have to pay close attention to the text and take extensive notes. And, while you’re at it, why not sort out plot and story (in the Russian formalist sense) for the whole text? List all plot incidents in chronological order and then reconcile that order with their appearance in the text. By the time that had been done and the ring-question answered, we’d know a lot more about that text, that very important text, than we do now. Anyhow, Douglas formulate a set of seven features she found diagnostic of rings, as follows (pp. 36-37): 1. Exposition or Prologue: There is generally an introductory section that states the theme an introduces the main characters… 2. Split into two halves: If the end is going to join the beginning the composition will at some point need to make a turn toward the start… 3. Parallel sections: After the mid-turn the next challenge for the composer of a ring is to arrange the two sides in parallel…When the reader finds two pages set in parallel that seem quite disparate, the challenge is to ask what they may have in common, not to surmise that the editor got muddled. 4. Indicators to mark individual sections: Some method for making the consecutive units of structure is technically necessary… 5. Central loading: The turning point of the ring is equivalent to the middle term, C, in the middle term of a chiasmus, AB / C/ BA. Consequently, much of the rest of the structure depends on a well-marked turning point that should be unmistakable… 6. Rings within rings: As Otterbo pointed out, the major ring may be internally structured by little rings… 7. Closure at two levels: By joining up with the beginning, the ending unequivocally signals completion. It is recognizably a fulfillment of the initial promise...