On Narrative Structure: Denby v. McPhee

Photo by Grant Cornett

I want to compare two New Yorker essays on narrative structure – David Denby’s “The New Disorder” (March 5, 2007) and John McPhee’s “Structure” (January 14, 2013). Denby, in his piece, looks at an array of movies that “jump backward and forward in a scrambling of time frames that can leave the viewer experiencing reactions before actions, dénouements before climaxes, disillusion before ecstasy, and many other upsetting reversals and discombobulations.” These movies include Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2001). Denby questions their topsy-turvy structures. He says of Babel, 

Part of the disconnection that the movie presents as a universal fact of our world is produced by the odd way it is put together. And, once one notices the inorganic structuring of the material, and the hostile tease of the editing, one begins to wonder if the conjunction of so many mishaps isn’t a kind of abuse of the freedom that’s normally granted to fiction.

Of another Iñárritu movie, 21 Grams, he writes,

“21 Grams” moves sideways and turns itself inside out, but in no order. We see Sean Penn lying in a hospital bed and then, a few scenes later, moving around outdoors, and then back in bed, and then making love, and then nearly dead, and so on. But why? Since none of the characters are part of any reality that makes sense to us, we can’t say, as we did at “Amores Perros,” that a social malaise has made the normal sequencing of the story irrelevant. On the contrary, we may wonder if Iñárritu and his editor didn’t scissor the movie into fragments in order to give soap-opera dismalness the appearance of radical art.

Denby doesn’t totally dismiss these “puzzle box” films. He says of Pulp Fiction, “By scrambling the time sequence, Tarantino explicitly created an impression of the eternal present, the sense that what is happening was always happening, will always be happening.” But he does make the case for chronological structure:

Storytellers, relying on sequence and causality, make sense out of nonsense; they impose order, economy, and moral consequence on the helter-skelter wash of experience. The notion that one event causes another, and that the entire chain is a unified whole, with a complex, may be ambivalent, but, in any case, coherent meaning, not only brings us to a point of resolution; it allows us to navigate through our lives.

Contrast this with McPhee’s view in “Structure.” He finds chronological order boring. He says, “After ten years of it at Time and The New Yorker, I felt both rutted and frustrated by always knuckling under to the sweep of chronology, and I longed for a thematically dominated structure.” He refers to his “A Fleet of One” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2003), an account of a road trip he took with trucker Don Ainsworth: 

Think about it. Think how it appeared to the writer when it was still a mass of notes. The story goes from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. Has any other writer ever done that? Has any other writer ever not done that? Even I had done something like it in discussing North American geology in “Annals of the Former World.” You don’t need to remember much past Meriwether Lewis, George R. Stewart, John Steinbeck, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and William Least Heat-Moon in order to discern a beaten path. If you are starting a westbound piece in, say, Savannah, can you get past Biloxi without caffeinating the prose? If Baltimore—who is going to care if you get through Cumberland Gap? New York? The Hackensack River. If you start in Boston, turn around. In a structural sense, I turned around—once again reversing a prejudice. In telling this story, the chronology of the trip would not only be awkward but would also be a liability.

McPhee opted for a thematic structure. He also tells about devising a structure for another journey piece, “Tight-Assed River” (The New Yorker, November 15, 2004). He says,

The river was the Illinois—barge route from the Mississippi to the outskirts of Chicago. At Grafton, in southern Illinois, the Billy Joe Boling collected its fifteen barges from larger tows in the Mississippi, wired them taut as an integral vessel, and went up the Illinois until constricting dimensions of the river forced another exchange, with a smaller towboat, and the Billy Joe Boling took a new rig of fifteen barges downstream. This endless yo-yo was not exactly a journey in the Amundsen sense. There was no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. If ever there was a journey piece in which a chronological structure was pointless, this was it. In fact, a chronological structure would be misleading. Things happened, that’s all—anywhere and everywhere. And they happened in themes, each of which could have its own title at the head of a section, chronology ignored.

I love that “Things happened, that’s all—anywhere and everywhere. And they happened in themes.” It’s certainly one way of looking at it. But does life really happen that way? Maybe in retrospect it does. I prefer chronology, a linear narrative that is mimetic of the journey itself. I suppose that makes me boring, but so be it. At least I’m not alone. To a degree, I think Denby is with me.