Skull Island ahead.
While I’d originally learned about ring composition in the mid-1970s, I didn’t start thinking about it seriously until I had entered into email discussions with Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, some time in the middle of 2001. She’d been studying ring composition for awhile, mostly in the Old Testament, and was wondering whether or not there could be a neural basis, that is, something more specific than the trivial fact that everything we do has some kind of neural basis. The best I could do was navigation, something I’d looked into in connection with my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil. Why would researching music have me looking into navigation? Because music is about time, and so is dead reckoning – but that’s a digression in this context.
Note: This continues the discussion I began in Beauty and the Beast: King Kong as ring composition, plus myth logic, New Savanna, October 2, 2017: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/10/beauty-and-beast-king-kong-as-ring.html
To the grocer’s and back
All animals have to navigate their way around the world, way-finding it’s often called. The neural structures for it thus must be ancient. And they are, the hippocampus among them.
So, imagine you take a walk to the corner grocer’s to get a quart of milk and you return home by the same route:
1. Walk out the front door and turn left on Oak St.
2. Walk three blocks west and turn right on Princeton Dr.
3. Go two blocks north. Big Al’s Little Grocer is on your left.
X. Enter and purchase A quart of Aunt Emma’s Dairy Fresh Milk.
3’. Exit Big Al’s and walk two blocks south on Princeton.
2’. Turn left onto Oak and go three blocks east.
1’. Turn right and enter your home at No. 223.
What I like about this is that the path is a ring-form, certainly not geographically (you don’t travel in a circle), but in the sense meant in ring composition. You start at one location (home), take a trip where you accomplish some goal (purchase milk) and then return to your starting location (home). You traverse the same path on the return trip as you did setting out, but in the opposition direction. The two paths are thus symmetric with respect to landmarks passed over time.
But you didn’t set out to execute a ring-form trip. You set out to get a quart of milk. The ring-form was a side effect of the interaction between your conscious intention and the lay of the land.
And that’s what I want for ring composition, a way to ‘generate’ it naturally without conscious deliberation. Journey’s are common enough in literature – Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Moby Dick, King Solomon’s Mines, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn come to mind. But do we have any ring-form texts where we have journeys of the requisite kind (same path to and fro)? Yes we do, King Kong and Heart of Darkness.
Journey to Skull Island
The movie doesn’t specify the route in detail, but the general idea is clear enough:
1. New York
2. Ocean Voyage
3. Skull Island: Native Territory
X. Skull Island: Kong’s Territory
3’. Skull Island: Native Territory
1’. New York
I’ve crossed out the ocean voyage on the return leg because that isn’t depicted in the film. We cut directly from Kong unconscious on the beach of Skull Island to New York City the day Kong goes on exhibit.
But of course it’s not the mere trip that’s important. That’s just a vehicle, if you will, for the story. What happens during each leg of the trip? Here’s a sketch:
1. New York: Denham recruits Darrow.
2. Ocean Voyage: Darrow and Driscoll fall in love.
3. Skull Island: Native Territory: Natives substitute Darrow for native woman as an offering to Kong.
4. Kong takes Darrow inland to his lair; Denham, Driscoll and others follow.
5. Driscoll wounds Kong in finger.
X. Kong defeats T-Rex in front of Darrow.
5’. Driscoll rescues Darrow.
4’. Return with Darrow through village; Kong goes on a rampage.
3’. Skull Island: Capture Kong.
1’. New York: Kong put on display, escapes and captures Darrow; Kong killed.
Note that I’ve elaborated the central sequence, treating Driscoll’s rescue of Darrow as the ‘answer’ to his wounding of Kong. I’ll justify that in a later post where I look at the underlying myth logic.
That last step strikes me as being a bit busy; too many events for only one segment. Here’s what I’m going to do: What happens is what’s important, as opposed simply to where it happens. Hence I’m going to drop the ocean voyage from the return left and redistribute the events of that last segment. That gives us this:
1. New York: Denham recruits Darrow.
2. Ocean Voyage: Darrow and Driscoll fall in love.
3. Skull Island: Native Territory: Natives substitute Darrow for native woman as an offering to Kong.
4. Kong takes Darrow inland to his lair; Denham, Driscoll and others follow.
5. Driscoll wounds Kong in finger.
X. Kong defeats T-Rex in front of Darrow.
5’. Driscoll rescues Darrow.
4’. Return with Darrow through village; Kong goes on a rampage.
3’. Skull Island: Capture Kong.
2’. New York: Kong put on display, escapes and captures Darrow.
1’. New York: Kong ascends Empire State Building with Darrow; Kong killed.
In this version Kong’s escape and capture of Darrow in New York (2’) ‘answers’ Driscoll and Darrow falling in love (2). Intuitively, that makes sense in terms of myth-logic – yes, I know, I’ve got some explaining to do...later.
Do I like it? Yes.
Journey to Central Station
The basic geography of Heart of Darkness is clear enough. Listed in ring form it looks like this:
1. Marlow gets a captain’s job in Europe.
2. Marlow crosses the Atlantic ocean to the Congo.
3. Marlow travels up-river to the Central Station
X. Marlow retrieves Kurtz.
3’. Return with Kurtz down river; Kurtz dies.
2’. Marlow crosses the Atlantic to Europe.
1’. Marlow converses with the Intended.
But we know that the central point in the narrative is not the retrieval at Central Station. Rather, it’s the longest paragraph in the narrative. And that paragraph isn’t narrated at or about the Central Station. The whole story is narrated long after the fact, and that paragraph enters the narration before the story has advanced to the Central Station.
That paragraph is indicated in this graph as the longest bar:
The paragraphs are listed from the left to right, with the length of the bar being proportional to the number of words in the paragraph. That paragraph, which I’ve called the Nexus, is not merely the longest one in the text, but it is the first time we learn much about Kurtz, one of the two central characters (Capt. Marlow is the other), it is bounded on either side by a man’s death, and it ends with Marlow asserting that he had formed a bond with his helmsman, the man whose death frames the paragraph – all of which I’ve explained at some length [1].
The paragraph is thus highly marked, which is why I’ve argued that it is structurally central. But, as I’ve noted, it’s displaced from the geographic center of the journey. It tells of events that took place before the journey, after the point in the journey where it is introduced into the narrative, and of events and things outside the journey all together. Yet, given its importance I did try to read the narrative as a ring form.
My first attempt was based on the fact that Heart of Darkness is a double narrative. Charles Marlow, the main narrator and ship’s captain, tells the story of the journey to four men on board a yacht in the Themes. It is only of those who tells the story to us. Thus the text begins and opens with the outer narrative, yielding this simple scheme:
1. Frame tale.
2. Main tale.
X. Central paragraph.
2’. Main tale.
1’. Frame tale.
That strikes me as rather weak, but the form is what I’m looking for. But, alas, it’s not true to the text. The frame tale intervenes in the main tale three times between the opening and the central paragraph, but NOT between the central paragraph and the final closure (see page 14 in [1]). That yields an asymmetry between the front leg of the circuit and the last leg, but it also introduces elements into the front leg that aren’t ‘answered’ in the last leg.
That’s the sort of consideration the brought me to coin the term “center point construction” to indicate a narrative with an obvious center point but that was not bounded by a symmetrical arrangement of episodes as in ring composition (see pp. 13 ff. in [1]). Center point construction is, from one point of view, a weakened version of ring composition. From another point of view, however, it is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for ring composition.
But, let’s set the frame narrative aside and do a bit more thinking. Here’s how that central paragraph, the Nexus, begins:
“I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie,” he began suddenly. “Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it—completely. They—the women, I mean—are out of it—should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, ‘My Intended.’ You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it.
The Intended, we come to know, is his fiancé. This desire to keep women “out of it–completely” is rather striking, and in a text where women would seem to be peripheral. But not completely, not completely.
Marlow’s last act in the narrative is to tell the Intended – she’s never given a name, only Marlow and Kurtz have names – of Kurtz’s death. She wants to know Kurtz’s last words. They were, we know, “The horror! The horror!”. But Marlow lies and tells her what she wanted to hear, that Kurtz’s last words, the last words of the remarkable Mr. Kurtz, were of her. Women also figure early in the tale. It was though an aunt the Marlow got the job; she referred him to the trading company:
I had an aunt, a dear enthusiastic soul. She wrote: ‘It will be delightful. I am ready to do anything, anything for you. It is a glorious idea. I know the wife of a very high personage in the Administration, and also a man who has lots of influence with,’ &c., &c. She was determined to make no end of fuss to get me appointed skipper of a river steamboat, if such was my fancy.
And when Marlow shows up at the Administration we’re told of the women who, in effect, stood guard on the inner sanctum.
Thus we have women at the beginning, a woman at the end, and the strenuous denial of women in the middle. That yields this scheme:
1. Marlow obtains captain’s job through agency of women.
2. Marlow travels to the Congo & upriver.
X. Marlow tells about Kurtz and his bond with the helmsman.
2. Marlow returns to Europe.
1. Marlow converses with the Intended; breaks with women.
Do I like it? Yes, it’s simple. Do I believe it? Not yet. there’s more thinking to be done, about women in the story, and about that all important bond, between Marlow and his slain helmsman.
Conclusion
I have no firm conclusions to offer. Both King Kong and Heart of Darkness are journey stories. Both journeys have an ontological dimension, from civilization to primitive. And both involve human bonding. In King Kong Driscoll and Darrow fall in love. In Heart of Darkness Marlow bonds with his helmsman while bonds with women are problematic. What’s more interesting is that the narrative of King Kong seems more closely bound, if I may, to the journey it chronicles than Heart of Darkness does. In the former the center of the narrative is also the center of the journal; that is not the case in the later. This merits further investigation.
I’m more sure of myself on the methodological front – yeah, I know, an ugly sentence. The only way we’re going to figure these things out – form in general, ring composition in particular – is through careful description and comparative analysis. I’ve already done a comparison of Heart of Darkness with Apocalypse Now [2], a film loosely based on it. Later in this series I’ll be comparing King Kong with Gojira (1954), the Japanese film, which is also exhibits ring composition [3]. It is only through comparison that we’ll be able to figure out what’s important and what’s incidental, to the form in general, and to it’s instantiation is specific texts.
[1] Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales, Version 2, Working Paper, October 2, 2015, 49 pp. URL: https://www.academia.edu/8132174/Heart_of_Darkness_Qualitative_and_Quantitative_Analysis_on_Several_Scales
[2] Ring Composition: Some Notes on a Particular Literary Morphology, Version 3, Working Paper, September 11, 2017, 71 pp. URL: https://www.academia.edu/8529105/Ring_Composition_Some_Notes_on_a_Particular_Literary_Morphology
Myth: From Lévi-Strauss and Douglas to Conrad and Coppola, Working Paper, December 2013, 12 pp. URL: https://www.academia.edu/7866632/Myth_From_Lévi-Strauss_and_Douglas_to_Conrad_and_Coppola
[3] The Gojira Papers, Working Paper, April 15, 2014, 35 pp. URL: https://www.academia.edu/7905287/The_Gojira_Papers
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