What is the shape of a book? Rectangle, says the wisecracker, or square if it’s a coffee table tome. Maybe you’ve read a triangle shaped book once before. Who knows? But I’m not talking about book shape, per se. I’m talking about the shape of the story.
I’ll give two examples: “Finnegans Wake,” by James Joyce, is a book told along the lines of a circle, and “The Ambassadors,” by Henry James, has been described as having an hourglass shaped story.
“Finnegans Wake” basically tries to tell the story of mankind and myth, in an insularly dense polyglot that is rather amorphous in design and interpretation. And the book is literally a circle; the last sentence of the book feeds into the beginning of the book.
It also approaches the infinite. Remember high school algebra: A circle’s radius/diameter is calculated using pi, which has yet to run out of decimal digits. Right now, it’s sitting pretty at over ten trillion. Combine that with the subject of man and myth and the whole self-referential dream tongue, and you’ve got a pretty neat headache to contend with.
Now, to “The Ambassadors.” I don’t have it on me whether or not James thought of the book as having an hourglass shape. I wouldn’t put it past him. In a critical essay on the subject, E.M. Forster described the book as an hourglass, where, “Everything is planned, everything fits; none of the minor characters are just decorative … they elaborate on the main theme, they work.” Furthermore, Forster says, “the symmetry they have created is enduring.”
Unfortunately, I haven’t read “The Ambassadors” in a while, so I can’t corroborate other than to cull a hazy “yeah, that sounds right” from memory. Such an interpretation certainly adds to the elegance of the story.
If we were to be literal and assume the novel is an hourglass, I wonder where exactly the tube narrows, where the pinch sets in. Where (James might say) the elements of the “tale” press their forceful energies in elucidation of the thing which organizes them. It could be Strether’s “Live all you can” speech. It could be Strether’s epiphany.
At any rate, I hope those two examples shed some light on what it means to talk about the “shape” of a book. Of course, only having two examples is no fun, so why don’t we spice things up and throw in two more? General cases, this time. Flights of fancy on my part.
The first “shape” to consider is more of a device, like the hourglass. It’s called a stereopticon, or a magic lantern. For anyone who’s been to a history museum or your grandparent’s house, a stereopticon is technically one of those viewing glasses that you put a specialized picture on and it makes it look 3-D. But a stereopticon is also a special projector with two lenses. Popular before movies, these devices could produce images that would seem to “melt” into each other as images transitioned. They were also very popular with seances for summoning “ghosts.” A book could work very well as a series of melting images, I think.
The other “shape” is also a device, of sorts, and another toy popular before moving pictures took off. We’re talking Victorian period here. The other shape a book could take is that of a thaumatrope.
A thaumatrope consists of two images painted onto one side of a two-sided card or circle cut out. One side may have a bird, for instance, and the other side a birdcage. Now, when this card was spun quickly enough, these images seemed to combine into one, despite being wholly discrete.
Wouldn’t that make a wonderful book? The only question would be whether you could spin the story fast enough to make it work.
Does this column have you bent out of shape? Tell Sean at sreichard@wisc.edu.
