A dynamic essay
I first learned of chiastic structure many years ago, and when it clicked I started seeing it everywhere. It was a bit like seeing the car you want to buy everywhere. But chiastic structure felt more profound than that, as if I could suddenly see, and understand, a large part of the underlying code of reality. Chiastic structure envelops our lives, and in some ways it makes reality look like an onion, or a Tootsie Pop: layers upon layers wrapped around a center. The natural question is, what is at the center? What is the point of it? We will get to that. But first, what is it?
Chiasmus is a simple mirroring structure, or ring structure, that pivots at its center and then repeats the first half in reverse order. The simplest example exists at the level of a sentence:
Never let a kiss fool you, and never let a fool kiss you. proverbial
That is the whole figure: two terms, then the same two the other way round, and the lines that join each to its twin make the letter. The joke is one use of it. This is another.
The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath. Mark 2:27
Chiasmus is named for the Greek letter chi. Set the two halves of a sentence side by side, join each term to its twin, and the lines cross. The word χιασμός means a marking with the Χ.
Four terms is the smallest case, A B B′ A′: the second half is the first half read backwards. Add a term with no twin and the figure gains a center, A B C B′ A′, and something happens to that center. In a symmetrical structure, whatever stands alone in the middle is what the symmetry was built to hold. Nils Lund, who spent a career on the pattern in the Bible, stated it as a law: the center is where the thought turns.
The vocabulary is loose, and different disciplines use it differently. This site uses the words this way:
The same shape works at every scale: a clause, a speech, a digression, a book, an epic. What follows moves outward, and the figures are interactive. Rest on any limb of a structure to see its twin; open a limb to read the passage behind it; fold a figure to see the two halves side by side. Every figure is drawn in the order the text gives, so where a proposed ring does not quite close, you will see the arcs cross and the strays sit unpaired.
Homer, the Babylonians, the Hebrew Bible: where the shape is oldest and best attested.
Everyone who has read the Odyssey knows the scar. In Book 19 an old nurse washes a stranger's feet, touches a scar above the knee, and the poem stops. For seventy-five lines it leaves the room: how a boar gave him the wound; how his grandfather came to name him; the journey, the hunt, the tusk; the healing; the journey home; and then the room again, the nurse's hands, the foot dropped in the basin. Erich Auerbach made this passage the first chapter of Mimesis, as the example of Homer's refusal to leave anything in shadow. It is also the cleanest ring composition in Greek. The narrator descends to the wound and climbs back out by the steps it went down, and the steps are marked in the words: a promise of gifts on the way in, the gifts given on the way out.
The technique of the digression is the technique of the whole voyage. Odysseus's own account of his wanderings, Books 9 to 12, is arranged around a visit to the dead. Circe sends him down; Circe receives him back. Between her two islands he goes to the house of Hades to consult a blind seer, because, she tells him, Persephone has left Tiresias alone among the dead with his mind intact (10.492–495).
Draw the adventures in the order the text gives them and the ring is visible, but it is not clean. Two of the correspondences are verbal: Polyphemus eats six men, two at a time, and Scylla takes six; the crew disobey at the Cicones' city and disobey again on the island of the Sun. Two are thematic: lotus and Sirens' song both erase the homecoming. But Sirens and Scylla come in the wrong order for a perfect mirror, and Aeolus and the Laestrygonians have no twins at all. The two strays are not noise. Read another way, the adventures fall into three groups of three, each two short and one long (Cicones, Lotus-eaters, Cyclops; Aeolus, Laestrygonians, Circe; Sirens, Scylla, the cattle of the Sun), with the dead set between the second group and the third, and that pattern is at least as old in the commentaries as the ring. Both are in the text. The ring is what this diagram can draw; the triads are what it leaves grey. Homer's ring is a habit of composition, not a template, and a diagram that hides the crossings and the strays is lying.
Book 11 has a hinge of its own. Halfway through the parade of the dead, Odysseus stops speaking. We are back in the hall of Alcinous; it is late; Arete and the king ask him to go on (11.333–384). On either side of that interruption stand a catalogue of women and a catalogue of men. Tiresias is not at the geometric center of the Nekyia. He is at its threshold, the first of the dead to be sought and the second to speak. But he is at the center of the wanderings, the one thing the voyage down was for. Where a seer stands in a ring, whether the ring is drawn around him or he is placed at its door, is a question this site's companion essay takes up in a very different book. Book 11 is drawn inside the center of the figure above; open it.
Widen the frame to the whole poem and the dead are still in the middle. The Odyssey is not a ring by book-count; twenty-four books do not fold at eleven. It is one by block. The hall in Ithaca with the suitors in it stands at both ends, and the two assemblies of the Ithacans, in Book 2 and Book 24, are the only two in the poem. The son goes out to Pylos and Sparta to hear of his father and comes back to find him; an ambush is laid on the way out and slipped on the way back. Twice Odysseus wakes on a shore not knowing where he is and asks whose land this is, in the same three lines, at Scheria and at Ithaca (6.119–121; 13.200–202), and everything that follows the question is reversed: received by strangers there, unknown to his own here; his true name given there, a Cretan lie here. Between the two shores is one night's telling, with the dead at its center and the seer at the center of them. What Tiresias says at the middle of the poem is the last thing Odysseus tells Penelope in bed at the end of it (23.248–287). The halves are not the same length, and the last limb carries the second Nekyia, in which Agamemnon and Achilles talk again; that answers Book 11 by echo, not by position. Open the center, and the center of the center.
In 1958 Cedric Whitman published a diagram that Homerists have been arguing with ever since. Homer and the Heroic Tradition proposed that the whole Iliad is built as a ring: Book 24 answers Book 1, Book 23 answers Book 2, and so on inward to a central block of battle. Whitman thought this was the same instinct that governs the Geometric pottery of Homer's century, whose bands of meander and figure are arranged in concentric symmetry around a vessel's belly. It is the most ambitious claim ever made for chiastic structure, and its famous fold-out chart shows rings nested inside rings.
The outer frame is not in dispute. Book 1 and Book 24 are twins down to their numbers: an old father comes to the Achaean camp with ransom for a child; a god is offended; nine days pass; twelve days pass; Thetis goes up to Zeus, or is fetched by him; Thetis comes to her son; the gods quarrel. In Book 1 the ransom is refused and the poem's anger begins. In Book 24 it is accepted and the anger ends.
Inward from that frame the pairings soften. Book 2's gathering of the armies answers Book 23's gathering for the games; the great day of Diomedes answers the great day of Achilles; the Trojans' first night on the plain (Book 8) answers the fight over Patroclus's body (Book 17). By the center, the long day of battle in Books 11 to 15, Whitman's scheme is doing more work than the text does. The blunt verdict: the frame is certain, the middle is argued, and the diagram's lasting value is that it taught readers to look for the shape at all.
The nesting is real, though, at the smaller scale. Books 3 to 7 form a ring of their own: a formal duel that settles nothing, a truce broken, Diomedes' day of glory in which he wounds two gods, Hector's withdrawal into the city to see his mother, his brother's wife, and his own, and a second formal duel that settles nothing. That ring sits inside the larger one the way a band sits inside a band on the vase. It is drawn inside the third limb of the figure above: open it, and the ring inside the ring unfolds.
It goes deeper than that, and this is the poem's habit rather than an accident of two passages. Open Book 1 and it is a ring of its own: two supplications frame it, Chryses refused by the king of men and Thetis granted by the king of gods; two quarrels sit inside them, the kings', which Nestor cannot end, and the gods', which Hephaestus ends in laughter; and at the middle Achilles alone on the shore with his mother rising out of the sea. Inside that, the voyage to Chryse (1.430–487) is a small ring the poem draws in its own words, a mast lowered on arrival and raised for home. Open Book 6 inside Books 3 to 7: Hector leaves the field, meets three women, refuses two of them for the same reason, and comes back through the same gate with Paris. Inside that, Glaucus's Bellerophon story is a speech closed by the word it opened with, γενεή, lineage, and the meeting with Andromache is closed by a helmet taken off and put back on. And Book 24, the frame's other half, is a journey out and back with Hermes as escort both ways. Poem, block, book, speech, gesture: four nests deep, and the same shape in each. Lohmann's finding was that the speeches do this almost without exception; the figure only draws the ones that could be checked line by line.
The oldest ring we have closes on a wall. The Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh opens by telling its listener to climb the rampart of Uruk and walk its length, to test the foundation and examine the brickwork (Tablet I 18–23). Eleven tablets later Gilgamesh, having failed to bring back immortality or even the plant of youth, says the same words to the ferryman Urshanabi (XI 323–328). The poem's answer to death is the thing it started with: the city, the brick, the work that outlasts the worker.
Inside that frame the tablets pair. Enkidu begins as a wild man and is made human by a woman, Shamhat, and then by bread, beer, oil, and clothing (I–II). Gilgamesh ends the way Enkidu began: after his friend's death he roams the steppe in a lion's skin, unwashed, and is told by another woman at another threshold, the tavern-keeper Siduri, how a human being ought to live (X). The march out to the Cedar Forest (III–V) is answered by the run through the mountain of Mashu, past the scorpion-men, into darkness (IX). And at the pivot stands the death of Enkidu (VI–VIII), which turns the poem from a story about killing monsters into a story about not being able to kill this one. The pairings are an arrangement, not something the tablets announce, but the frame is verbatim, one verbal echo is exact (six days and seven nights, twice), and the twelfth tablet, a late appendix translated from Sumerian, is generally agreed to stand outside the ring.
There is one more nesting. In Tablet XI, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh the story of the Flood: how a god warned one man to build a boat, how the waters rose and fell, how birds were sent out to find land. It is a complete story set inside the larger one, and it is the ancestor of the next example.
Hebrew narrative and Hebrew poetry are the richest field for the pattern, and the place where it was first studied systematically: by John Jebb and Thomas Boys in the 1820s, and by Nils Lund in 1942. At the smallest scale it can be exact to the word. Genesis 9:6 is six words in Hebrew, folded at the middle:
Isaiah 6:10 folds a whole body: heart, ears, eyes; eyes, ears, heart.
And Matthew 7:6 is a chiasmus that most readers straighten out without noticing. It is the swine who trample and the dogs who turn and tear.
At the largest scale, the Flood. Gordon Wenham's 1978 analysis of Genesis 6–9 laid the narrative out as a palistrophe of thirty-one members, symmetrical around one clause: and God remembered Noah (8:1). The number series is the strongest evidence, and it is hard to explain any other way: seven days, seven days, forty days, a hundred and fifty days; then a hundred and fifty, forty, seven, seven. Some of the outer members are thin (an ark in 9:18 is doing a lot of work), and Wenham's figure has been trimmed by later readers. But the center stands. Lund's law again: the turn of the story is a single verb of memory, exactly halfway.
Rings at the center of rings: Gilgamesh opened four deep, and the same figure at four scales in the Iliad.
The figure is self-similar. Where it is found at the scale of a book it is usually found inside itself at the scale of a chapter, a speech, a sentence, and the nesting is not a flourish but the ordinary way the shape occurs. The figures on this site are built for it: a limb marked ◎ holds a ring of its own, and opens; a ring inside a ring may hold a line. The plainest case is not the largest but the deepest.
In Gilgamesh each ring sits at the center of the one above it. The flood is told inside the poem, by the one man who survived it; the storm is the center of the flood; the seven-and-seven is the center of the storm; and the line on which the Deluge stops is a chiasmus of its own, verb, subject, subject, verb. The poem nests its tellers the same way. The prologue says the king wrote his own story on a tablet and bids the reader open the box and take it out; inside that, Uta-napishti tells Gilgamesh the flood as a secret of the gods; inside that, Ea tells Uta-napishti through a wall of reeds what to build and what to say; and inside that is the speech Uta-napishti is to make to his townsmen, a promise of bread and wheat from the sky that means the opposite of what they will hear. Four tellers deep and four rings deep, with the same thing at the bottom of both. The figure below is the one drawn in Part I, opened all the way down.
Whether the flood as a whole is a chiasmus down to the line, as the Genesis one has been shown to be, I have not found argued; but the lines around its six days are, and the Akkadian says so more plainly than any translation does. The goddess screams like a woman in childbirth before the storm and the sea thrashes like a woman in labour after it; the phrase ‘turned to clay’ stands on both sides with its halves swapped; and the line on which the Deluge stops, ušḫarrir imḫullu abūbu ikla, runs verb, subject, subject, verb.
Genesis 9:6, the six-word chiasmus drawn earlier, sits among the commands to Noah after the ark, near the far end of Wenham's thirty-one members: a ring of words inside a ring of episodes, and it is drawn there now, inside the flood figure. In the Iliad, Whitman's ring of twenty-four books holds the ring of Books 3 to 7 (open the third limb of the figure), and Dieter Lohmann showed in 1970 that the speeches are built the same way, opening and closing on one thought, so that the nesting runs from the poem to the paragraph. The poem also contains a ring you could hold. The shield Hephaestus makes for Achilles is described from the center out: earth, sky, sea, sun, moon and stars in the middle; then two cities; then ploughland, harvest, vineyard and herds; then a dancing floor; and last the river Ocean around the rim (18.483–608). Matthew's gospel alternates story and sermon five times, and readers since Lohr (1961) have set the five in a ring around the parables of chapter 13; inside that, the Sermon on the Mount has been laid out around the Lord's Prayer; inside the Sermon is the sentence about dogs and swine drawn above. A line inside a sermon inside a gospel, and the figure below is drawn that way, open. The outer ring is contested and the inner two are not, which is how these things usually go.
The figure since 1845: Douglass, Beckett, Shelley, Mitchell, Nolan, the Wachowskis, Lucas.
The figure never went away. Speechwriters keep it because a sentence that turns on itself is easy to remember and hard to answer.
Beckett used it to close a play. The two acts of Waiting for Godot end on the same two lines, and the only thing that changes is who says which. The stage direction after both is the same: they do not move.
At the scale of a whole book the shape is usually made by nesting: a story told inside another story, which is told inside a third, so that the reader goes in through the frames and comes out through them in the other order. The center is whatever stands at the bottom of the nest. Frankenstein (1818) is the classic case. Walton's letters to his sister hold Victor's story, told to Walton on the ice; Victor's story holds the Creature's, told to Victor in a hut on the glacier above Chamonix; and the Creature's story holds the history of the cottagers he has been watching, which he backs with copies of Safie's letters, procured as proof. A letter inside a story inside a story inside a letter.
I found the center of the book by arithmetic before I found it by reading. Once it was clear what shape the thing was going to be, I turned to the last page, took the page count, halved it, went back a few pages for good measure, and began. The middle of Frankenstein is the Creature at a pool of water, seeing himself for the first time: how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! The most inward point of a book about a maker who will not look at what he made is the made thing looking at itself.
David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004) does the same thing with six stories instead of three, and makes the shape the whole point. Each story is set later than the last; each is broken off at its midpoint; the sixth is told entire; then the other five are finished in reverse order. Each narrator reads or watches the story before his own, so the nesting is in the plot as well as in the table of contents. Mitchell has called it a Russian doll. The center is the story set furthest from us.
A dream inside a dream inside a dream is the same shape as a letter inside a letter inside a letter, and Inception (2010) is built on it exactly as Frankenstein is. The team goes down through four levels of sleep, each held inside the one above, and each is closed in turn on the way out, as Victor's story closes and then Walton's does. How long each level takes is beside the point, on the screen as in the book: what makes the shape is that nothing can close until what it holds has closed. At the bottom is limbo, where Cobb tells Ariadne what he did to his wife. The film's first scene, Cobb washed up on a beach and brought to an aged Saito, is a piece of that center shown before we can read it, and the top on Saito's table there is the top spinning in the last shot.
The Matrix (1999) is a ring rather than a nest: not levels but a return. It begins in room 303 of the Heart o' the City Hotel, where the police find Trinity in the first minute, and it comes back to room 303 at the end, where Agent Smith is waiting for Neo. Halfway between, Morpheus takes Neo to the Oracle, in her kitchen, under a sign that says know thyself; she tells him he is not the One and keeps back the one prophecy that will bring him back from the dead.
The frame is three deep and exact. The film opens in room 303, follows Trinity across the rooftops with agents behind her, and puts her out through a phone booth that Smith destroys with a truck the instant she is gone. It closes by putting her out through a subway phone that Smith destroys with a bullet the instant she is gone, following Neo through the streets with agents behind him, and bringing him back to room 303: phone, chase, room, the opening's three moves in reverse, with a bullet for a truck. She reaches her phone and gets out; he reaches his and Smith is already there. The ring closes on the shot. What follows, Neo getting up, seeing the code, the call from a booth, the flight, stands outside it, and the film seems to want it there: the rules the ring ran on, the Oracle's, Smith's, gravity's, stop holding at that moment. Where a ring ends is a reading; the figure below draws the last minutes in grey and says so.
The coda answers the ring's own opening from outside it. Trinity's ‘get up’ to herself on the rooftop becomes her ‘now get up’ to him; her impossible leap across a street becomes his flight; her escape through a phone becomes his refusal to leave; the first words in the film, Cypher asking whether she likes watching Neo, become her last words to him, which the Oracle's withheld prophecy turns out to have been about all along. Inside the ring the pairs are these: the name, given to Neo by his screen in the scene after the booth is destroyed and claimed by him, against Smith's ‘Mr Anderson’, in the scene after the receiver is; Morpheus's crew hauling Neo out of the pod by a claw, answered by Neo hauling Morpheus out of a building by a helicopter, the freeing reversed; the jump program, where he is told to let go of disbelief and falls, answered by ‘I believe I can bring him back’, where he does not fall; and Cypher, who cannot see the code, on both sides of the Oracle, his steak dinner the last scene before her and his betrayal the first scene after. Smith's interrogation of Morpheus needs a word, because it is not a scene but a situation: it is cut across the whole rescue, from the virus speech to the moment Morpheus snaps his chains as the helicopter opens fire, and so it has no single place in the order. Drawn where it begins it crosses two other pairs; drawn where it ends, which is where its weight seems to fall, it answers Smith's interrogation of Neo in mirror order and the middle of the film closes without a crossing. That is a judgement and not a rule, and it is worth being plain about what it shows: a film is cut, and a cut scene can be put in more than one place, so the fit between a film and a ring is looser than the fit between a poem and one. Two choices of ours went into this figure, the placing of that scene and the reading of the jump by what it says rather than what it shows. Both are defensible. Neither is forced. The figure is drawn as if they were true, and the footing says they are choices.
The original Star Wars trilogy (1977–83) has the oldest shape of all at its center: the descent. Halfway through The Empire Strikes Back, which is also close to halfway through the three films end to end, Luke is on Dagobah with Yoda, and Yoda sends him into a cave that is strong with the dark side and holds only what he brings into it. He meets Vader there, strikes the head off, and the mask breaks open on his own face. Everything after that is the mask coming off for real: first the voice under it at Cloud City, then the face on the second Death Star. Around the center the films pair off cleanly enough: Vader masked in the first minutes of A New Hope and unmasked in the last minutes of Return of the Jedi; a Death Star destroyed at the end of the first film and a second one half built at the start of the third; Tatooine, the droids in the desert, and a mentor's hut in each. And as in the Odyssey, the seer's advice at the center is ignored on the way out. Luke leaves Dagobah before his training is done, against the advice of both his teachers, and pays for it with a hand.
Most of what gets called ring structure in popular storytelling is inclusio: an opening echoed at the close, with no claim about the middle. Citizen Kane begins and ends on the fence at Xanadu; Pulp Fiction begins and ends in the same diner, at the same table, during the same robbery; Lost opens on a man's eye opening in a bamboo grove and closes, six years later, on the same eye closing in the same grove; the last conversation of Seinfeld is the first one, about a button. Whole cycles have been drawn as rings too: the six Star Wars films, by Mike Klimo, pairing the first with the sixth and so inward, and the seven Harry Potter books, by John Granger, with the fourth at the center. Those are claims, not observations, and the next part is for testing them.
Six questions that separate a ring in the text from a ring in the reader, put to work on a hard case.
The pattern is easy to find because it is easy to invent. Any two lists can be paired if the labels are vague enough, and the literature on chiasmus is full of diagrams that exist only in their author's vocabulary. John Welch, who edited the standard collection (Chiasmus in Antiquity, 1981), later published fifteen criteria for judging a proposed structure. Mary Douglas, coming to ring composition from anthropology, insisted that a ring is a construction the reader must be able to check. Reduced to questions:
One more thing, which is a warning rather than a question. The fit between a text and a ring has some give in it, and the give is where the reader's choices live. A ring has edges, and the edges are a reading: texts have codas that stand outside their rings, the twelfth tablet of Gilgamesh, the last book of the Odyssey on some readings, the last ten minutes of The Matrix on this site's, and where you close the ring can change which pairs mirror and which run parallel. A scene that is cut across other scenes has no one place in the order, and where you put it changes the shape of the middle. A pair can be read by what it shows or by what it says, and the two readings do not always land in the same place. None of this is a flaw in the method; it is the method. A diagram that hides its choices has decided the question without arguing it. The figures here mark what they leave outside, say where they have placed what could be placed elsewhere, and grade each pair in its note, so that a reader who would choose differently can see exactly what would change.
None of this makes the shape less real where it is real. It makes the claim worth something. The rest of this part puts the six questions to the hardest case on the site, and the one this site was built for.
Ring composition had no name while Joyce was alive; van Otterlo's term dates from 1944, three years after his death. But Joyce read the Odyssey, and he built his own central episode as a ring. "Wandering Rocks," the tenth of the eighteen episodes of Ulysses, is the only one with no counterpart in Homer. It is the route Circe describes and Odysseus does not take (12.59–72). It has nineteen sections. The first belongs to a priest crossing the city; the last to the viceroy crossing it the other way: church and state, Stephen's two masters, holding the episode like the two hands of a frame. Between them, by count, section ten. In it a man stands at a bookstall and is sold a book. The eight pairs between the frame and the center are drawn by mirror position, each with a note saying what, if anything, holds it; two hold by little more than position, and are drawn dashed. That is as much as this site claims for the episode.
The Odyssey's ring of wanderings holds a blind seer at its center, consulted and ignored. What Joyce put at the center of his is argued in the companion essay to this site. Here it is enough to show the shape, and to put it through the six questions, because this is the weakest case on the site and the one that most needs them.
The echoes are not in the words: no phrase repeats across a pair, so on the first question the episode scores badly, and the pairs are thematic at best. The boundaries are the strongest thing about it, since Joyce marked the nineteen sections himself and the count is not ours. The center is not a turn in the plot; it is a purchase, which is the argument the companion essay has to make and cannot assume. Nothing is left out, because all nineteen sections are drawn. A competing shape explains a good deal of the same evidence: the episode is a set of parallel panels, all happening at one hour in one city, and the interpolations cut across the sections rather than mirroring them. And it does not entirely survive the drawing: two of the eight inner pairs hold by little beyond their position, and the figure below draws them dashed for that reason. What is left is a frame the critics agree on, a count that is Joyce's, and a middle section that a reader has to argue for on other grounds.
Where the shape was found before anyone wrote one: a day, a month, a year, a life.
The shape is older than writing, and I think I know where it was found. Before anyone composed a ring, everyone lived inside four of them. A day rises from a horizon to a height at noon and goes back down by the same steps to the same horizon; the sun's height at three is its height at nine, and evening is morning read backwards. The moon comes out of the dark as a sliver on one side, fills in a fortnight, and empties in another fortnight to a sliver on the other, so that the waning crescent is the waxing crescent in a mirror. A year lengthens its days to midsummer and shortens them by the same steps to midwinter. And a life goes from helplessness to strength and back to helplessness, so that the last of Jaques's seven ages is the first one over again, and the proverb has it in four words: once a man, twice a child.
These are not cycles only. A cycle repeats; a wheel has no middle. What the day, the month, the year and a life have is a peak, and a second half that passes back through the states of the first, and that is what a ring has and a wheel does not. The turn is the point, and the order is the point; the lengths are not. A slow morning and a quick afternoon are the same ring, and so are a two-hour descent and a twenty-minute return. What makes a ring is not that the halves take the same time but that the second cannot happen until the first has, and closes what the first opened, innermost first. And the year does something more: draw the hours of light and of dark across it and the two lines cross twice, at the equinoxes. The year writes the letter.
They nest. Inside the day is the night's sleep, which is four or five descents through the stages to the deepest and back up to dreaming, ninety minutes each: rings inside the ring of the night inside the ring of the day. Inside those is the breath, in and turn and out, four seconds, the smallest ring a body makes, and speech rides on it, so that even a sentence said aloud rises and falls on a single breath. The tide floods to high water and ebbs by the same measure twice a day. Every errand is a ring, home to the far point and home again by the road you came, and the oldest plot there is, the return, is the shape of a day's walk. Above the year are the rings of a body's month, which has its own midpoint, and of the generations: the child who was fed feeds the parent, one life's ring laid over the next.
The ancients did not need this pointed out. The riddle the Sphinx sets Oedipus maps a life onto a day, four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening. Ovid's Pythagoras asks whether we do not see the year take four shapes in imitation of our own lives (Metamorphoses 15.199–213). Plato's craftsman, making the soul of the world, cuts it into two strips and joins them crossed in the shape of the letter Χ (Timaeus 36b–c): the circle of the sun's year laid across the circle of the daily turning, meeting at the equinoxes; the letter was in the sky before it was on a page. And the Egyptian sun spent every night in the underworld, twelve hours down and back, with the deepest hour, the sixth, in the middle, where the god met his own body: a descent to the dead at the center of a ring, every night, for three thousand years, which is the Nekyia before Homer.
So I do not think the ring was invented by poets. It was found, as the arch was found before anyone built one; and what was found was not a length of time but a nesting, one state held inside another and let out again in the order it went in. A story that goes out and comes back; a hero who goes down at the middle and comes up; a sentence that turns on itself: these are the day and the night and the year set to words, and someone hearing them by a fire was hearing the shape of the thing they had lived since morning and would live again tomorrow. When the modern theory of drama was finally written down it came out as a pyramid, rising action, climax, falling action, the turn in the third act of five (Freytag, 1863): a ring with its arcs erased. The figure is the oldest we have because the thing it copies is the oldest thing we know.
That is a claim about origins, and this site cannot prove it. What it can do is show the shape at every scale where it is found, drawn in the text's own order, with its center marked and its strays left grey. If the shape in the texts is the shape in the sky, then the texts are not only imitating one another. They are all imitating the same thing.
The question the introduction asked, put to three journeys.
At the beginning I asked what is at the center. What is the point of chiastic structure? Why this elaborate cocoon around some small event or scrap of dialogue? Joseph Campbell's hero's journey is a useful framework for an answer, because it so often overlaps with, or maps directly onto, a chiastic structure. At its core the hero's journey is about an individual who leaves the group, goes on a harrowing adventure to discover some secret knowledge or wisdom, or to gain some tool or resource, and then returns to the group with the gift. Draw it as Campbell drew it, as a circle, and the ring is already there: the hero goes down one side and comes up the other, each station on the way in answered by one on the way out, and at the bottom, furthest from home, the thing he went for.
In The Matrix the center is Neo's visit to the Oracle, where the talk is of fate and of knowing yourself. Neo goes in a self-doubting but highly capable man and comes out, by the end, a fully actualised one, with complete belief in his ability to exercise his own agency. The secret knowledge is in the vase he accidentally breaks. ‘What's really going to bake your noodle later on is: would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?’ The Neo who emerges in the second half is one who has shed the free-will question. The answer is irrelevant, and worrying about the question is a waste of time; what matters is what you do, free will or not. Fate be damned is still fate.
With Luke Skywalker we get something similar. Yoda tells him to lift the X-wing out of the swamp and he tries, and loses confidence, and it sinks back. Yoda lifts it, and Luke says he doesn't believe it. Yoda's response is everything: That is why you fail. It is the last word on a notion the scene has already put in plainer form: Do, or do not. There is no try.
In the Odyssey we get something subtler. At the center is another oracle, Tiresias. Odysseus has been sent to the underworld so that Tiresias can tell him a secret that will get him home. Now, your average high-school English teacher will tell you that the secret is this: Poseidon is angry at Odysseus for blinding his son, and Tiresias reveals it, and to appease the god Odysseus must one day take an oar on his shoulder and walk inland until he reaches people who have never seen the sea and mistake the oar for a winnowing fan, and there plant it and sacrifice a ram, a bull and a boar to Poseidon. That is all in the speech (11.100–103, 119–137). But it is not the secret. It is a plot mechanic. The real secret is in the lines between, and Tiresias gives it in the plainest terms he has (11.104–111):
Even so, though you suffer, you may yet come home, if you are willing to hold in check your own spirit, and your companions', when you first bring your ship to the island of Thrinacia and find the cattle and fat sheep of the Sun grazing there. Leave them unharmed, and keep your mind on your return, and you may yet reach Ithaca, though you suffer. Harm them, and I foretell destruction for your ship and your companions; and if you yourself escape, you will come home late and badly, having lost them all, on another man's ship.
Odyssey 11.104–115, the author's rendering; the word for what must be held in check is θυμός, the spirit, the appetite, the thing that wants.
The Odyssey is about how a man gets from war mode to society mode. His first order of business after leaving Troy is far from admirable: he and his men sail down the coast and do some good old-fashioned raping and pillaging to add to their spoils. Not exactly civilised behaviour. He is in war mode. He is, to put it plainly, an asshole. But at the end of the poem he enters his own kingdom as a literal beggar, Athena's work, in a disguise that could not be more precisely counterposed to the beginning. The whole journey is a humbling. In order to regain his rightful place as a ruler he has to transform, from the warlord into the king. He has to gain control over the wild desires born of war, which were necessary to help win the war. That is the whole point: what is necessary in one situation is inappropriate in another. Context is everything, and switching between contexts can be difficult, and even painful.
The Odyssey is about the change a soldier has to go through in order to be a functioning part of society on his return. Our modern world, which flies Boeings full of soldiers to and from the battlefield, could learn a thing or two from the ancient epic. Decompression sickness is what happens when you rise from the depths too quickly; perhaps PTSD is in part what happens when you switch contexts too fast, one day taking off some enemy's head and later that week getting hugs and kisses from a spouse and a small child. The juxtaposition is probably too disorienting for most people. Perhaps some decompression is required. Perhaps what is needed is a journey.
At the center of the Tootsie Pop is where the goods are. In a story, it is usually the key to why the whole story exists in the first place.