Gardner does talk about other structures for fiction, but he firmly favors the causality of the arc and says that Aristotle would, too.
The introduction alone serves as a master class in interrogating our preconceptions, tracing the narrative arc from Freytag’s triangle back to its Aristotelian origins before introducing other ways of seeing, while also serving some delightful shade (“Novels didn’t exist for Aristotle and weren’t Freytag’s subject. While the structure of this important new entry into the craft book/literary criticism space is familiar-an introduction and epilogue bookending two sections, Primary Elements and Patterns-the content is fresh, with each section comprised of chapters deeply exploring a diverse array of global texts, from Tobias Wolff to Caryl Phillips, Sandra Cisneros to Joyce Carol Oates. Alison has created a virtual page-turner. In Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, Jane Alison challenges our notion of the narrative arc as the paragon of form in Western fiction. How can you spread color across a story? Make texture with different kinds of words or sentences or zones of white space? Create repetitions or symmetries to strengthen (or trouble) a sense of movement? Even arcing fictions can be designed, with texture, color, symmetry, or repetitions graphable as wavelike stripes, these elements working beyond or with narrated incidents to create further motion and sense. I hope…that thinking about patterns other than the arc will become natural, that evolving writers won’t feel oppressed by the arc, that they’ll imagine visual aspects of narrative as well as temporal, that they’ll discover ways to design, being conscious or playful with possibilities.
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