8. Worked Analyses

Three close readings of published arrangements, a short screen reading and the household revision case. Each reading names the architecture, the strands and their questions, the markers, the rates and the meeting.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969): a mosaic with an anchor

Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier taken prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge, survives the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 in the meat locker of a slaughterhouse, comes home, marries, becomes a prosperous optometrist, survives a plane crash, and says he was kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who see all moments at once. The novel moves among these times in short sections, without dates, because Billy has come unstuck in time, and a first chapter in the author’s own voice explains how long it took to write about Dresden and why.

The architecture is a mosaic, and its order is governed by Billy’s involuntary travel, which is association made into a premise. Story order can be reconstructed without much trouble, and the reconstruction loses what test 1 (Necessity) asks for: in sequence, the book would be a war story followed by a life, and Dresden would be its climax; in the mosaic, the reader keeps arriving near the bombing and being taken away, and it is told at last, briefly, near the end. The mosaic’s centre is an anchor the book circles, which makes the order a recurring approach to an event that a sequence would have had to narrate as a climax and that the book refuses to make into one. The Tralfamadorians’ account of their own novels, many moments seen at once with no beginning, middle or end, is the book describing itself, and the refrain So it goes, after every death, levels the times as the order does. Orientation is carried by the strands’ own material, the prison camp, the optometry office, the zoo on Tralfamadore, which the reader learns quickly, so the book needs no headings. The mosaic has no convergence in the usual sense; its meeting is the bombing, the one time all the others lead back to.

Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing (2018): a converging braid

The novel braids two strands. One begins in 1952, when Kya Clark is six and is left by her mother, then by her siblings and father, to grow up alone in the North Carolina marsh. The other begins in 1969, when the body of Chase Andrews, the town’s former star quarterback, is found below a fire tower, and follows the sheriff’s investigation. Each chapter is headed with its year.

Each strand has its question. The investigation’s is who killed Chase, or whether anyone did; the 1952 strand’s is not whether Kya survives, which the 1969 strand shows, but how the abandoned child becomes the woman the town calls the Marsh Girl and suspects, and whether she is capable of what it suspects. The second question is one the present cannot answer, which is why the past strand is read for itself rather than skimmed. The rates differ widely: the 1952 strand covers seventeen years, the investigation a few months, so the interval shortens through the book until the past strand reaches 1969 and the two merge for the arrest and the trial. The reader feels the meeting approach as the years in the headings rise towards the investigation’s.

The investigation chapters are short and thin, and a reader who preferred the marsh might skim them; the braid tolerates them because their job is a clock, putting pressure on every chapter of the past. The convergence is of times and, at the end, of cause: after Kya’s death in old age, a poem and a shell necklace found among her things recast the verdict. The arrangement withholds that truth, and test 8 (Withholding) asks whether anything in the book besides the order explains the delay; the answer is Kya, who kept it.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014): a parallel braid joined by objects

The novel opens on the night the actor Arthur Leander dies of a heart attack on stage in King Lear in Toronto, as a flu pandemic begins that will kill most of the world. It then moves among Arthur’s earlier life, his marriages and friendships; the weeks of the collapse; and Year Twenty, when Kirsten Raymonde, a child actor in that Lear, travels the Great Lakes with a company of actors and musicians who play Shakespeare to the settlements.

The architecture is a braid whose interval does not close: the strands are separated by the collapse, and no strand travels across it to meet another in time. They meet by identity, through people and objects that survive the gap. Arthur gave Kirsten two copies of a comic, Station Eleven, drawn by his first wife, Miranda; the other went to his son, Tyler, who in Year Twenty is the prophet whose cult threatens the company. The glass paperweight, passed from Clark to Arthur and Miranda, back to Arthur and on the night of his death to Kirsten, aged eight, is carried for twenty years. Clark, Arthur’s oldest friend, keeps a museum of the old world in an airport. These are the test cases The Transition (Chapter 5) named for the bridging object, and they meet the condition of The Mechanism: each changes hands or condition across the gap, so that its presence in Year Twenty measures what has been lost and through whom. The comic is the strongest case, since its changed condition is a change of meaning: a private work by a woman nobody remembers becomes scripture for one reader and consolation for another.

The strands’ questions are distinct. Year Twenty’s is whether the company will survive the prophet; Arthur’s, which the opening has already ended, is what his life amounted to, which the present answers only through the objects he gave away. The book’s order delivers its theme, that what survives is what was handed on, more than any single strand states it.

A screen reading: Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)

Leonard, who cannot form new memories since an attack in which his wife was killed, hunts her killer with photographs, notes and tattoos. The film has two strands. Colour sequences run backwards, each ending where the one before it in the film began; black-and-white sequences, in which Leonard talks on the telephone in a motel room, run forwards. At the end the black-and-white strand reaches the point where the colour strand’s last sequence in story order begins, and the picture turns to colour as a Polaroid develops.

The reverse strand gives the viewer Leonard’s condition: like him, she meets each scene without knowing what led to it, and learns the cause only in the next sequence she sees. The forward strand is the clock and the orientation marker in one, since colour itself tells her which time she is in, the cheapest marker on screen. The convergence is of times and changes the meaning of the whole: the first act in story order, shown last, discloses that Leonard has chosen to deceive his future self, so the hunt the viewer has watched backwards was set up by its hunter. The arrangement withholds that truth for a reason the film gives, the hero’s amnesia, which is why test 8 (Withholding) passes.

The household revision case: a second timeline for the father

The situation. The household novel’s present runs from about four months after the father’s death in March to the end of July. The prologue is his last ordinary day, three days before he stopped answering the phone; Nadia remembers, at about two-thirds, the second time he lost the good pen; and Dov’s one viewpoint chapter, at about 78 per cent, is the evening of 9 March, when he finds his father’s last entry broken off and begins to write in the ledger. The reader saw that entry, and the looser hand beneath it, at about a quarter of the book, when Elena found the ledger in the register drawer and saw where the hand changed without reading.

Version A, the draft. The father’s strand of The Problem: six dated chapters in his viewpoint, from February to the evening of 9 March, braided through the first three-quarters of the book.

Diagnosis. The strand passes test 3 (Orientation), since every chapter is dated, and fails most of the others. Test 2 (Strand question) fails because the strand’s only open question is what the father knows, and that is the book’s largest reveal: the strand must disclose the illness to the reader alone at a tenth of the book, or keep it out of a mind that knows it, which fails test 8 (Withholding) and commits The Reveal’s withholding viewpoint (Chapter 15). Test 5 (Rate) fails, since the strand covers five weeks in six chapters and the present a few weeks in the rest, a lockstep. Test 7 (Convergence) fails, since the strand reaches 9 March just before Dov’s chapter of the same evening, two chapters of one evening from two minds, and the meeting delivers nothing the reader lacks. The strand also spends Nadia’s memory of the father’s line, and grants a fourth viewpoint against the allocation that The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13) settled.

Version B, the revision. Cut the strand. The order chart of the book without it shows that the novel already has a second time, March, in two instalments, and an object that joins it to July:

The March strand’s question is the prologue’s in case of what, which Dov’s chapter sharpens without answering, and its rate is a few days across the whole book against the present’s few weeks, a counterpoint that shows at the crossing in the ledger, where eleven years of one hand meet four months of another. The revision adds one thing: Dov’s chapter is headed 9 March, the only dated heading in the book, written as the date stands in the ledger. The reader has seen that date on the page where the hand changed, about half a book earlier, so the heading orients her by an object she knows rather than by a calendar, and turns the date she saw into a time she now enters.

What the revision has not solved. The father is no less a ghost: he lives in a prologue, a memory and his hand, and the early reader who wanted more of him will still want it; the defence is that his absence is the book’s subject, which a reader may reject. The interval between the prologue’s day and 9 March is undated, since the prologue counts from the day he stopped answering the phone and the canon does not say whether that was the ninth. A single dated heading declares an exception that must be checked against the book’s other chapter headings. And Nadia’s memory of the pen lies in a third time, the recent past, with no heading; its marker is the second time he lost the pen, which must stand in its first sentence, or a reader may take it for the March strand.

See also: the full treatment, with readings of Cloud Atlas, Hamnet, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Dunkirk, and the household’s order chart and strand table in full.