The New York Times, Monday, March 26, 2007
The feeling is familiar. You are listening to a piece of music, and nothing links one moment with the next. Sounds seem to emerge without purpose from some unmapped realm, neither connecting to what came before nor anticipating anything after. The same thing can happen while reading. Passages accumulate like tedious entries in an exercise book. Chaos, disorder, clumsiness, disarray: these must be the marks of poor construction or, perhaps, of deliberate provocation.
In a strange way, though, the very same sensations might also be marks of our own perceptual failures. Perhaps the order behind the sounds is simply not being heard; perhaps the logic of the argument is not being understood. Paying attention to anything alien can be like listening to a foreign language. There may be logic latent in the sounds, but it is not evident to untrained ears.
This is one reason we so persist in trying to find order, even when it is not first apparent. It is almost a faith in science, psychology, religion and art: an unshakable conviction that some pattern will be found. And often it is. Now, a brief book by the British anthropologist Mary Douglas, “Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition” (Yale University Press), provides another glimpse, cursory but suggestive, of this quest for pattern.
Over the course of her career Ms. Douglas has become a master at discerning order in unexpected forms and surprising places. In an unassuming way, without pretense or revolutionary claims, she reveals the logic behind the varied customs of a society. One of the arguments made in her classic book “Purity and Danger” was that herein lies the very work of a culture: to shape a rigorous order that can hold threatening outside forces at bay. Societies divide the world into the clean and the unclean, the permitted and the forbidden, the pure and the polluted, imposing their categories on the continuities of nature, creating order while disclosing it.
This order is also preserved and passed on through literary and religious texts, which must themselves communicate a culture’s way of understanding the world. Why, though, Ms. Douglas asks, are so many of these texts so disorganized, so clumsily written — at least according to generations of readers? The biblical Book of Numbers, she points out, has been dismissed as an unstructured miscellany; one important scholar, Julius Wellhausen, looked at it, she writes, as if it were a “kind of attic used for storing biblical materials that did not fit,” almost a “junk room for the rest of the Pentateuch.”
Over the centuries many Chinese novels have also been attacked for lack of structure, repetition and episodic incoherence. So have Persian and Zoroastrian poetry. Even the Iliad has come in for its share of criticism. Ms. Douglas adds, “The terms disarray and chaotic, together with disordered, clumsy, and other pejoratives” crop up very often in descriptions of the texts that interest her. She herself reacts like an anthropologist surveying a society’s strange customs. “Whenever I read criticism of dire editorial confusion,” she writes, “my pulse quickens; I scent a hidden structure.”
In many cases she finds one. “Writings that used to baffle and dismay unprepared readers, when read correctly, turn out to be marvelously controlled and complex compositions,” she writes. Many epic works of non-Western cultures, she explains, have a distinctive shape: they are constructed in the form of rings.
Here is how the ring works. First there is an introductory section, a prologue that presents the theme and context. The story then proceeds toward its crucial center: the turning point and climax. Once there, the beginning is invoked again and the tale reverses direction. The second half of the story rigorously echoes the first, using verbal markers — like repetition or changes in style — but proceeding as a mirror image, as if the writer is walking backward through the plot. The ending is a return to the beginning. The ring structure also resembles an unrolling thread that is then pulled back onto its spool.
This pattern, Ms. Douglas and other writers have suggested, appears again and again in world literature. She argues, for example, that the biblical story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac is laid out in ring form. It begins with God’s call to Abraham; the turning point comes when the angel calls to Abraham before he strikes Isaac, their interchange echoing the words at the beginning. Then, step by step, the story reverses itself, repeating at each step language used earlier.
In her brilliant analysis of the biblical book Numbers (fully explored in another of her volumes, “In the Wilderness”), Ms. Douglas has found that the entire text is constructed in a circling and mirroring form, in which bands of narrative alternate with layers of legal writ. A work that might seem a structural hodgepodge takes on, in her analysis, a rigorous logic; the parallels established by the ring form assume important meanings that are crucial for understanding the biblical book’s preoccupation with the priesthood and authority.
Ms. Douglas explores the ring structure in more recent literature as well (including Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy”), but for the most part, she writes, the pattern has become lost to Western perception. Narratives rigorously written in ring form have come to seem chaotic and clumsy. This is not, she insists, because they are esoteric codes but because today we look elsewhere for order, distrusting the ring form’s rigorous demands. The ring can seem to overturn linear logic and expectation; we prefer open-ended explorations and mistake order for chaos.
I’m not sure that that is the full explanation. And this book is too limited a survey to do the theme justice; it suggests more than it proves. But there is a compelling reason for why the ring pattern that Ms. Douglas outlines works so well: It maps out the ways in which human beings make sense of things.
At first one event follows another. We may not be entirely sure where it is going. Is there a point at all? Then, with declarative emphasis comes the turning, where, with a shock, we hear a first echo. We connect these different moments; a pattern begins to take shape. Then, step by step, other similarities are heard — they too take on meaning — moving backward from the most recent to the earliest in time, until we return to where we began. This kind of narrative needs to be heard again, for it is only in the retelling that the full nature of its order is revealed.
The ring form thus seems to presume repetition and re-interpretation to be understood; it almost takes on the aspect of ritual. It also seems to presume a community that will share in accumulated understanding. Is this perhaps what makes the ring form so alien to contemporary life? Right now, disorder seems much more realistic.