Multidimensional Map: Part 2

Motifs and Refrains, Repetitions and Variations

Last week, in my post of April 28, I recommended tracking various narrative elements of a text with a Multidimensional Map that charts the frequency and location with which they occur.

Motifs are among the most important of these elements, but I think it’s worth pausing to state that it’s not the major motifs you likely to need to fuss over. The biggies are probably so obvious to you that you’re in control of them already. Black/white and light/dark motifs are as bold and unmistakeable in Invisible Man as whiteness is in Moby-Dick, and one can safely assume neither author ever doubted whether they would become guiding, indeed structural, elements of their stories. You probably have a theme or two of this sort and don’t need any advice on how to handle it.

However, writers usually also deploy multiple less dominant motifs that are nonetheless critical to the themes, story development and structure of their texts. These sort of motifs can benefit from careful fostering and cultivation in a way that major ones don’t require. It is these minor motifs I’d suggest you track, if you decide to make some version of a Multidimensional Map for your project. Finding them and all their instances can remind you to carry them consistently throughout your entire text, building pattern, rhythm and structure, and also make you aware of opportunities to vary and develop them as your story unfolds.

I’ll draw a few examples from books we’ve read aloud together in The 24-Hour Room Flow Reading sessions that have taken place every weekday morning for the last four years, starting with the current book, Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart.

Art, love and ambition are the undeniable major themes in Lucy Gayheart, but the motif that I’m most excited about tracing is that of gossip, hearsay, and indirect information. It begins in the very first sentence: “In Haverford on the Platte, the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.” We know she’s the subject of their chatter, yes, but not much of what they say, how true it is, or why they’re still musing about her. Has she become famous? Infamous? Died? The whispers themselves are wispy, vague, tantalizing, leading us to read on. Over and over, from that page on, what people say, or report others to have said, or what people induce from the partial views of the reality they’ve had access to — these (and the uncertainty and error that inevitably arises from them) all skew the small and large events of the story.

In Invisible Man, one of the motifs I’m most interested in is money: that thrown on the ground at the battle royal, the coins in Mary’s smashed, racist iron bank, the pathetic “compensation” check the I.M. receives after being first injured and then experimented on at the paint factory, the wages paid by the Brotherhood, the I.M.’s denigration of Brother Tobitt as Brother Two-Bit, the 25¢ price of Tod Clifton’s paper Sambo dolls. The series of violent events that punctuates the story are also crucial structural events. From the punching of the bypasser in the prologue to the battle royal to the electroshock to the execution of Clifton to the eventual state of civil disorder and threatened mugging that sends the I.M. underground, the violence collectively charts a demoralizing lack of progress toward a dreamed-of safer, more just society.

In Moby-Dick, for me, it’s not the whiteness of the whale but the wrinkles in his brow that are most engaging. They’re first mentioned by Ahab in Chapter 36, but actually, the whole book is wrinkly. There are 31 instances of word "wrinkle" and its variants. (only two fewer than mentions of cannibalism!). Most of these wrinkles are in the brows of Ahab and Moby Dick, but we also see wrinkled floorboards, decks, ocean surfaces and charts. Hieroglyphs are likened to wrinkles, and the lines of wrinkles to lines of text, which demand to be read and comprehended. In chapter 44, The Chart, alone, there are 4 instances of the word wrinkle. In chapter 79, after musing on the wrinkled, hieroglyphic brow of Moby Dick, Ishmael challenges the reader: "I but put that brow before you. Read if it you can."

PROMPT: MAP YOUR MINOR MOTIFS

The multiple recurrences of gossip or money or violence or wrinkles are never casual or meaningless in the books mentioned above. The fact that they recur tells us there is something important in each instance where they occur. So, find a couple or a few recurring images that are your text’s minor motifs. Look for every instance and iteration of these. If they’re not already, sprinkle them judiciously and meaningfully throughout your text. Let them eveolve and change (or not, if that’s the point!). Don’t harp on them over much, don’t interpret them for the reader. Just make sure they’re doing all the work they possibly can for you, and they will guide your eventual readers to a greater understanding of your story.