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narrative density
I'm currently reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (thanks Angela, thanks Crystal). Stephenson is an unusually confident writer, and when this confidence doesn't curdle into arch-geek arrogance (which it does, on occasion) it makes his prose a lot of fun to read. I'm also impressed by the breadth and scope of the narrative—I've been thinking a lot lately about just how much one can wedge into a book and still have it tell a story.
Let me try to explain what I mean this way. Cryptonomicon (at least the first 200 pages of it) is essentially about three main characters, Shaftoe, Waterhouse, and Randy. Assign each character a color and the basic structure of the book could be graphed out like this:
Whereas Imaginary Year, which has shorter chapters, which focus on a wider array of characters, would look more like this:
The number of characters is one thing (but not the only thing) that contributes to what I think of as a book's overall density. Density is something that I look for in a work of fiction, but of course there's a trade-off—the more characters a work has the less it has the opportunity to develop any one of them; the less it can be said to cohere as a quote-unquote story. Technically there is no reason why a book could not focus on, say, 100 different characters, giving each a single short chapter, but is it possible to write a book like that without losing the pleasures of narrative? (I can imagine some sort of meta-frame, which would allow someone to say "this book tells the story of a city" or "this book tells the story of 100 generations of a family bloodline," or whatever.)
Another thing that contributes to a book's density might be the number of digressions from the plotline. Again there's a trade-off: the more digressions a book contains, the less it can be said to even have a plot. (Some of my favorite books (e.g. Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine) have very little plot but are merely a series of great digressions strung together.) Cryptonomicon is occasionally digressive, but most of those digressions (at least so far) connect up in some way to one of the three "master narratives" of the book, making it fairly dense but still narrative-driven.
I would say that Cryptonomicon is more dense than something like Moby Dick, which contains its share of relevant digressions but focuses on one main character, but less dense than something like Infinite Jest, which has more characters, more digressions, and less narrative cohesion.
Is it valid to think of density and narrative as being at opposite ends of a continuum, with straightforward narrative (one protagonist, minimal digression) at one end and with something like avant-garde poetry (extremely dense linguistic constructions with no narrative coherence) at the other end? And, if so, (this is the question I keep asking myself), where do I want my work to fall on that continuum? |
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
12:02 PM
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