In Offense of Narrative Structure

by Mandira Pattnaik

Paola Aguilar

In my literary journeys, while anchored faithfully to writing, I sometimes drift on the passionately pulsating ether of boundless opinion called Social Media. It’s a veritable afterwork hangout, though there’s no closing, no vacations and no time-outs. I check on writer friends I am glad to have known through the writers’ community on there, and read work that catches my attention.

The support is definitely unmatched, and I’m infinitely sure increased online networking has much to do with our shared global situation. From open literary magazine submission periods, to new book stores in Chicago, to readings and launches, to book reviews — the wealth of information one can access, should they so wish, is incredible. A published novelist set out to put their experiences of querying in a thread, concluding that the times now were hard for everybody: “it feels less like Art is subjective and more like Art is non-existent.” That tweet received a lot of traction, most corroborating it. Though I am nowhere near querying, it interested me to dig into details and an article suggested that the typical, or median, American adult read five books during 2021, a number that has remained unchanged since 2011! Other articles claimed fewer people bought print books, reading as a habit was on the decline and subject matters varied wildly. Simultaneously, several publishing houses were collapsing into each other.

But Art, do we create, in spite of ourselves, and books get written, get published and are read. Statistics may go take a walk. The existence and vibrancy of the global lit community seems to be a huge factor in that.

However, almost equally incremental with the passage of the pandemic years is a marked propensity for online hatred. And writing Twitter is no exception: outrage over supposedly unevolved language, incorrect political standings or perceived non-alignment to the majoritarian political view. Social Media depends on generating engagements, and offense fuels it.

I usually steer clear of random opinions that seem purposely uttered to stoke controversy. Points do not define a periphery. It is in appreciation of this that I seek out topics outside of Social Media. Hate and offense to fuel a reaction doesn’t seem new. I soon notice this when I read about literature’s “most controversial” Nobel laureate in an article. Though Austrian Peter Handke received the honor in 2019, and was condemned for his recent political standings, his “anti-play” Insulting the Audience (1966) grabs attention. In the absurdist presentation, four characters have no storyline to play out, rather they turn the audience into the main point of interest by making them aware of how they are breathing, sitting, thinking. They embark on a rant, and focus on what the audience is wearing and how they have gone through the motions of “going to the theatre.” The idea was to show where, that is at what point, the audience gets “offended.” Towards the end, the significance of the insults is questioned — -what exactly makes these words (any words for that matter) more than just noise — why they become significant items which hold meaning, and are therefore, offensive. Handke’s play was a successful narrative excursion at that time. Later works of Handke also focus on the narrator’s perception and are episodic explorations arising out of a series of encounters with people and nature, in lieu of narrative arc.

Now, narrative structures can be disruptive (though not to the extremity of Handke’s Insulting the Audience) and be sensational to readers. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas uses several incomplete, interrupted narratives in the pattern 1–2–3–4–5–6–5–4–3–2–1. It was shortlisted for the Booker, and won the British book Awards Literary Fiction Award, among other honors, and was made into film. Among shorter forms, I recently read “An Index of How Our Family Was Killed” (Conjunctions, Matt Bell) and loved its “splintered” structure.

By furthering the argument, we may await answer as to at what point any fiction, stripped of action, character and dialogue, is attractive to the reader? The question merits new experimentation. Again, misplacing punctuations — acknowledged signposts of writing — is literary hara-kiri. But, what if they were knowingly released into erotic chaos, similar to the proliferating pattern of natural abundance, akin to pollen grains or the movements of bees, what would the work become? Writers are possibly already trying that out!

Pulling back a little, let’s say we have narratives with non-linear energy, untamed natural flow of words. In the structure of flash fiction, that does sound promising. Parallelly, if short works (including poetry) are drained of obedience to grammar and conformity to the structure of tension-climax-resolution, they become new work altogether. To forfeit the inevitability of an end, to reject the expectation of a conclusion, appears very lucrative at the moment. I would even hope the non-linearity to breed new channels of productive creative exploitation because they’d be unique, and yielding to rawness, like flashes of memory or naptime dream. Like monsoon cloud too heavy to keep hanging and bursting forth with richness.

Meanderings like this, in thought and in process, is rewarding.