Most readers when they think of the way a narrative (novel, comic, tv show) is ordered will think about plot: what Brian Richardson, in his “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses,” describes as “a teleological sequence of events linked by some principle of causation; that is, the events are bound together in a trajectory that typically leads to some form of resolution or convergence.” This is the classic organization often thought of with the terminology of Freytag: rising action, climax, and denouement. Most articles or books you read on writing will focus on this type of organization.
In his article, Richardson describes a number of varieties of “nonplot-based narrative ordering,” those that are not focused on cause and effect. I’ve been interested in these types of nonplot narratives for quite awhile, devouring all sorts of experimental fictions, but I’ve noticed how little we see these types of orderings in comics. The “graphic novel,” such as it is, is very much stuck in a plot-based narrative structure (not universally, there are always exceptions). So, in the interest of getting you, my readers, thinking about this, I’ll summarize and comment upon this article, briefly enumerating each of Richardson’s varieties of nonplot-based narrative orderings and bringing in my own observations related to comics. Richardson comes up with ten varieties:
a) after the order of an earlier text: Ulysses is well known for basing its order on the Odyssey (on which see Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses). I’m basing my webcomic Things Change loosely upon the ordering of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. We’d also see this in the various adaptions of fairy tales or myths.
b) in a rhetorical order: Works that are ordered in such a way as to explicate a thesis or worldview. This is much more common in literature from previous centuries, such as Voltaire’s Candide.
c) “aesthetic” orderings: Sequencing based on motifs, architecture, numerology, geometry. This is common in many oulipian works, such as Gilbert Sorrentino’s Crystal Vision which is organized based on the cards of the tarot.
d) generated by pictures within the text: Common in Robbe-Grillet’s work such as In the Labyrinth, which describes a painting and then works elements from that painting into the rest of the novel.
e) “verbal generator”: “…a few select words go on to generate the object or actions depicted,” which I’m not sure of any clear examples of, but which bears some relation to Roussel’s method.
f) alphabetical patterns: We see this in Abish’s Alphabetical Africa as well as encyclopedic type works like Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars, both are which have alphabetical orderings.
g) “Serial constructs”: “Repetition of events rather than progression from one event to another.” See Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy or to a certain extent Peanuts.
h) collage, recombinations, and rearrangements: Burroughs is a prime example here, as is something like Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1.
i) multiple orderings for reading: “Forking paths,” hypertext, and the like, perhaps most popularly seen in the “choose your own adventure” books.
j) aleatory: chance or random orderings. Try a Surrealist novel.
Richardson makes the point that many of these orderings work independently, in compliment to, or in opposition to conventional plot. “It may well be that the most compelling narrative sequences are those that seamlessly interweave two or more strategies of progression, making the independent orderings seem to be coextensive and unobtrusive.”
The comic strip is one place where narrative orderings other than plot proliferates. Think about Peanuts. While many (most?) of the strips themselves obey the orderings of cause and effect–often in the form of the set-up-beat-punchline–through the progression of strips we see an ordering of serial constructs, repetitions, and variations.
Another alternative ordering, other than serial constructs, that one sees in comic strips is that based on the calendar. Events follow each other on a rigorous day-to-day basis not with cause and effect but through the simple passing of time. At the highest degree this would be the daily diary strip like American Elf. At lower degrees there are the seasonal/holiday shifts in Peanuts. While many comic strips (online and off) are published daily, they are not necessarily ordered in such a way, narratively. Adventure or soap strips from the classic newspaper style (Steve Canyon, On Stage) or webcomics (like Scary-Go-Round) appear daily, but the narratives maintain a plot-based cause/effect ordering. Gasoline Alley could well be the ultimate combination of plot and calendar/time based ordering, where the strips tick off the accumulation of days, months, years, decades in a way that is possibly unique in a fictive narrative. The strip has no end. This is not all that strange in comics, but it would be in literature or really any other media (except maybe soap operas).
Richardson, Brian. “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
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15 Responses to “Nonplot-Based Narrative Ordering”
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Marvelous Post.
Thanks, Stephen.
Interesting post, Derik. Is that book worth reading or have you just essentially summed it up for us? I think a lot about the relationship between traditional “conflict-based” storytelling and its relation to more challenging orderings and arrangements of narrative. It’s interesting to me how often stuff that at first seems very non-plot based does indeed have a strong plot structure, it’s just been shuffled around–in the best cases in a way that enhances the overall experience of reading through the work. A lot of people resist conflict/climax/resolution model of narrative because it smacks of Hollywood and 19th century realist novels but I think it’s an impulse that runs deeper and is ultimately formalist: most works of narrative want structure, and there are few things more basic than a conflict and its resolution, or, more generally, a change that is introduced into a character’s life that sets their life off-balance in some way. You can see it in apparently nebulous works like Robbe-Grillet’s novels (Le Voyeur, La Jalousie, even Dans le Labyrinth as I remember) and David Lynch films (just look at Mulholland Drive and all the online commentary about it–ditto Inland Empire).
I find myself almost obsessively looking for works that manage to free themselves from that underlying structure and it’s very hard! Contemporary art film is probably the closest right now. Movies like Claire Denis’ L’Intrus or Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours are undeniably works of narrative but are structurally open-ended and don’t have clear Robert McKee-approved story structure. Yet even so, they constantly skirt the “conflict” issue: the dying protagonist’s search for redemption in L’Intrus, the love story and the somehow-related search for the escaped tiger in Blissfully Yours.
I’m rambling a bit, in part because it’s so hard to say any one definitive statement about this topic. I guess the overall point is: I have learned to stop worrying and love the plot! I may have to cut-and-paste this into my own blog…
If you want to read an entertaining and occasionally eye-rolling attempt to demolish “central conflict theory,” check out Raul Ruiz’s Poetics of Cinema, a collection of rambling, entertaining essays that still don’t manage to convince me that you can escape conflict-based plot, as much as I want to go along with him…
One last comment on your observations about Peanuts, which are also very perceptive: there is something about the non-continuous serialization of daily, weekly or even monthly comics that, I agree, is oddly avant-garde. The Peanuts crew (or Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pupp, or the Archies gang for that matter) suffer an odd kind of short term amnesia: they know who they are the remember their various relationships, but in every strip it’s as if they are coming to life for the first time, like alternate-multiverse versions of themselves… And this may be related: some peers of mine are resistant to the notion that cartoonists should be doing “graphic novels” if they want to be doing important work, and are attached to the serial format regardless of its lack of closure. I don’t feel that impulse myself, particularly, and I don’t care for it when it’s simply a manifestation of nostalgia, but I’m intrigued by the idea of treating the serial format as a rich creative medium–whether the daily strip or the never-ending epics of Batman. In a way, that’s what los bros Hernandez, especially Jaime, have been doing along, and come to think of it, I wonder if that has something to do with why they haven’t made as big an impact as most of us fans think they should have: because the format of L&R has no analogy in the rest of culture, not in prose or film–only in soap operas? Jaime’s work is not a novel, he’s not doing what Dickens did–serializing a novel in chapters; I don’t think there is an end point to the Maggie and Hopey saga, it will just end when he dies, or they do. And that’s really kind of unusual…
OK now I’m rambling as well as procrastinating… back to work!
Matt
Hey Matt, Derik–
so I’ve been struggling for the last few minutes with the temptation to answer the above posts, when I should be focusing on my own work, of which I have a ton. As you can see, I’ve finally given in.
Matt, I think what you’re looking for here is the old Russian formalist distinction between “fabula” and “syuzhet,” pretty much picked up by the French structuralists as “histoire” and “recit.” The former terms–”fabula,” “histoire”–denote the chronological concatenation of diegetic events. The latter refer to the way the events are organized in the formal organization of the text. So you can have “non-plot-based” organizations of the text that still refer to a linear narrative diegetic plot. A good example of this is the Winckler/Bartlebooth main strand of “Life A User’s Manual”–where a formalized “recit” still allows us to reconstruct a (unusual, yes, but still linear, still based on the psychologically-motivated conflict and resolution between characters) clear narrative.
The fact that, no matter how varied treatments of the “recit” you may find these days, you have a hard time finding works that deep down do not have a conventional “histoire” I think says more about the conservative period through which we are living, and the backlash against experimental modernism, than about a general theory of storytelling, novels, etc.
Before I go on with this thought, two observations, though:
a), obviously, you are thinking of prose-based “fiction” works, because formal, non-narrative organizations can be found everywhere in other genres and in other arts–for example, in poetry (first example that comes to mind: Paul Muldoon’s book-length “Madoc” or Ashbery’s “Flowchart”), in music (for example, in many concept albums, that may be intended as unified works of art, not simply as collections of songs, that still have a progression, but that do not have a simple “narrative”–first example, off the top of my head, Pulp’s “This is Hardcore”), etc etc etc.
b) Robert McKee’s “Story” is a frightening reductio ad absurdum of classical plot structures. While it seems to dominate American storytelling these days, not just in movies but also in novels, its formula characterizes only a small part of traditional plot-based narratives. Most great nineteenth-century novels, from “The Sentimental Education” to “The Charterhouse of Parma” to “The Devils” would be simply unacceptable within McKee’s worldview. Furthermore, as I remember first reading in an essay by Milan Kundera, even from this more generalized point of view, the eighteenth-century provided many narratives that were much freer than the standardized model of novel storytelling of the nineteenth-century: “Tristram Shandy,” “Jacques le fataliste,” “Voyage autour de ma chambre,” etc.
That said, what interests me–and I think what Matt is asking about–is not simply things that transcend the McKee formula, but also more generalized plot structures. Here’s where we get back to the point I started earlier: obviously, I can think of many, though not very many recent ones: Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s “Last Year at Marienbad,” Godard’s “Weekend,” Beckett’s trilogy or any of his later novels, Philippe Sollers’ “Drame,” “Nombres” or “Lois,” Jean Ricardou’s “Prise de Constantinople,” and so on and so on and so on. I’ve never been able to get all the way through “Finnegans Wake,” but I imagine it also fits here. I must say, I find it really distressing that our cultural horizons have narrowed so much that films or novel that, had they been produced in the 60′s or early ’70′s, would have been seen as conventional compared to such works, now appear to be cutting edge.
From the point of view of comics, of course the great representative is Martin Vaughn-James’ “The Cage.” Interestingly, the last few years, or decade, have seen a flourishing in comics of the kind of non-narrative works that, a few decades ago, would have been seen as “high modernist” or “experimental” and greatly praised for it. I am thinking of things such as Kevin Huizenga’s “Chan Woo Kim” from Supermonster 8; the work of John Hankiewicz, especially in Tepid 2003 (IIRC) and 2005 (though, if I were to be true to some of the movements to which I find myself most sympathetic, foremost amongst them the Tel Quel school, I would find in both these works some nostalgic tendencies that still bespeak a kind of unredeemed humanism…); of course Gary Panter’s “Jimbo’s Inferno” and “Jimbo in Purgatory;” and most recently–and perhaps most stunningly–Warren Craghead’s “How To Be Everywhere.” I find it interesting, and a bit distressing, that this movement has already, to some extent, been “called to order,” pulled back: Huizenga is focused more on character and plot-based narratives, Kramer’s Ergot, which had announced such a powerful breakthrough with issue 4, has in the most recent volumes been devoting more and more space to more “traditional” narratives, and so on.
I could try to offer a diagnosis, prescriptions for the future, etc., but it’s already getting late. I guess I’ll stop here.
(Multi-part responeses are called for here)
Matt, I think we are talking about two things here. Plot as it is discussed in this particular article (it’s an article not a book, and yes, I pretty gave the highlights, though I neglected to point out that he finds examples of every type of ordering in Ulysses) is “cause and effect towards an end” ordering. This is not necessarily about conflict/resolution, rather it is about how the narrative progresses from one part/section/moment to the next. This happens which causes this which causes this which all leads towards some conclusion. Plot as a narrative ordering is separate from a thematic sense of conflict, which I agree is hard to take out of most work.
Great point about Jaime’s work. That element of unending movement is one of the things that really draws me to his work, and one of the most radical parts of his work, partly because he combines it with a sense of history/memory, a very distinct sense that is frequently used in the stories.
(More later)
Derik, I’m sorry you’re right that I fundamentally misread the distinction between cause and effect ordering and conflict/resolution plotting… no great harm done, anyway.
Andrei, first of all thanks for re-capping the Russian formalist plot/story distinction, I did have that in mind. You are stating more pointedly something that I see too, an overall conservative trend in culture these days. I’m not overly concerned about it in the long run because these things will always run in cycles and I think western culture as a whole is worn down by modernism and doesn’t know where to go next and so has retreated into more comfortable forms for the time being. I think a lot of readers will come back around to more experimental form and content in the years to come (I just hope not TOO many years!).
I do indeed refer primarily to narrative work in prose, film, and comics in my last comment. I think long-form poetry and especially music lend them selves more easily to less linear, cause-and-effect, central-conflict type structures.
In comics I think John Hankiewicz is one of the most challenging narrative artists working right now. I read Warrens’ stuff a little differently, like poetry, whereas John’s stuff always feels like it’s telling or about to start telling a story. Maybe the quasi-realistic, clinical line drawing (which has become increasingly beautiful and eerie over the years) is part of what make his stuff feel more narrative, Warren’s work tending to more open layouts and sketchy pencil drawing. Anyway, that’s what excites me as a reader the most: works that skirt that edge of traditional narrative form and content.
back to work
M
Andrei: Your comments (and emails) also give me much to think about and at a loss for writing a decent reply. As it happens two comics you mentioned–the Jimbo books and Hankiewicz (in this case, Asthma)– are on my list for reviews/posts.
I only later realized my omission in not listing the Jimbo books as an example of “ordered based on other works”.
I had the pleasure of touring the Masters exhibit with Gary Panter acting as docent for SVA students and factulty and he explained some of the organizing principles behing Jimbo in Purgatory–each page corresponds not only to a canto from Dante but also to stories from the Decameron. I can’t explain his technique because it seems to be a blend of the quasi-scientific and the intuitive, but it’s pretty intense either way. Also: the first page of the book has the opening lines of Canterbury Tales encoded into the decorative border, starting at the top left, which Gary demonstrated by reciting the prologue in Chaucerian English: “whan that Aprill with his shoures soote” and so on….
M
I’ll admit to not being a huge fan of Panter’s work, but the Purgatory book has me intrigued enough that I got a copy of Jimbo’s Inferno too. Plus I love the giant oversized volumes.
Have you read Cola Madnes or hunted down a copy of the old Pantheon collection, Jimbo in Paradise (that’s the best place to start, I think). Actually, the Jimbo works as a whole and also DalTokyo form a similar kind of open-ended serialized narrative we were talking about earlier.
M
Jimbo in Paradise is on my list to get a copy. I’m still not completely clear on the relation between the three books.
I’m awaiting the DalTokyo book from Fanta (later this year?), but I found the few samples in… Kramer’s Ergot(?) interesting if inexplicable (wasn’t sure if that was a context thing or not).
There is no direct connection between “Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise” and the other two books. JAiP just collects much of the early Jimbo material from Raw and other places. I honestly think it’s amazing–in many ways, it’s closer to my heart than the Inferno and Purgatory books. The problem with the Inferno book is that it was originally published as issue 7 of the Zongo Jimbo series. While issues 5 and 6 were fill-ins, it directly continues the storyline from issues 1-4 (which, however, are not Dante-, or anything else, based), and makes A LOT MORE SENSE if you have read them. Actually, I guess those issues 1-4 are a bridge from the earlier Jimbo material (including Cola Madnes) to the Dante-based works. The other book that feeds into this is his early mini (reprinted a few years ago), “The Asshole,” whose protagonist reappears in the Zongo series.
Well that’s a little confusing. So Jimbo in Paradise is not the collection of stories that lead up to Jimbo’s Inferno?
No, not at all. Jimbo in Paradise is late ’70′s-80′s material. The Zongo comics, from the mid-late ’90′s, have not been collected.
I’m jumping in a few days late, but wanted to add something. Thanks Andrei for the heads up about this thread and blog.
For non-linear comics I think of them as non-cinematic, with most other comics going along with a film-idea of how to make the comics work.
The imposition of structure is an artifice, and for me right now it’s best when its out in the open, like in Jimbo.
I like the idea of Gasoline Alley as never ending not just because I want good things to last, but because it more closely resembles the way we experience the world.
Hernandez is a great example – he’s had many places to stop but just doesn’t and each episode makes Maggie and Hopey etc seem more real to me. It meanders like our lives do.
I watch the TV show LOST ( I pretend its for my job, but really I enjoy it) and I’ve heard people complain about how things never get resolved, or each resolution brings more mysteries. My answer is, yeah, like life.