Then another sentence follows: “His father told him that story: his
father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.” To the first
sentence’s single character, the second adds another and situates them
both in a dramatic situation. Since the second sentence states that the
first was only a story, the writer has already engaged potential readers in
a marvelously tangled and recursive process of models packed within
models, forcing them to readjust perspectives since this second sentence
too is part of a larger story.
Soon, however, as the writer continues, sentence blurs into sentence;
a larger pattern emerges and the unfolding story acquires an illusionis-
tic reality. Partially forgetting he’s composing individual sentences now,
the writer looks ahead to where each new sentence might lead in the
larger scheme. As sentences build into paragraphs, paragraphs into
episodes, and episodes into subplot and plot, every sentence now
includes a gist of all that precedes it and contains within it the seeds of
all that will follow. In the language of complexity, the novel has become
a complex hierarchy of nested scales. This is what allows the writer to
initially glimpse the whole in the part.
Between the low level of the sentence and the high one of plot, lies
a middle level, where characters develop and take on a life of their own,
forcing the writer to adjust the action of other characters and accommo-
date the plot to their motives and actions. This is one of the ways that
feedback occurs in writing. Paradoxically, though each individual sen-
tence contains a tiny part of a character, characters can’t be reduced to
the sentences that compose them any more than people can be reduced
to their atoms. They have a holistic nature—another element of complex
systems. Similarly, though each sentence constitutes a small part of the
plot, the plot is an emergent quality that exists on a higher level than its
constituent elements.
Plot, as Aristotle perceived, is the central mapping device of drama and
fiction; it’s also a large-scale map of time. Its rhythms ripple through pages
and chapters like large, low-frequency waves. Incidents and episodes are
smaller-scale rhythms whose vibrations contribute to it. Curiously, time can
also be mapped at different scales within the novel: from summary para-
graphs that condense many years into a few pages to dialogue-filled scenes
that move in real time. We accept these odd conventions unconsciously
until a writer like Sterne comes along to deliberately bore and annoy us
with exaggeratedly long descriptions or until a Joyce invents stream-of-
consciousness to model time and thought in a new way.
Of course, not all stories begin, like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, by calling attention to their own artifice and declaring their status154 Paul Lake