Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.09.

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Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.09.37

Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles. An Essay on Ring

Composition. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2007. Pp. xv, 169. ISBN
0-300-11762-0. $28.00.

Reviewed by Pivi Mehtonen, University of Tampere

(paivi.mehtonen@uta.)
Word count: 1399 words

Table of Contents
The timely and almost archetypal interest in the pattern of ring
composition is the topic of Thinking in Circles, the last book by the
anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921-May 2007). She nds
interdisciplinary grounds for her dialogue between anthropology
and literary analysis in pattern perception and the structuralist
theory of language, in particular in Roman Jakobson's theory of
parallelism as a faculty inherent in the relation between language,
grammar, and the human brain. The ring structure is seen by
Douglas as a system of diverse parallelisms, yet despite the
"naturalness" of such parallels she claims that for some reason the
Western reader is slow to recognise ring structures. Douglas calls
this paradox "Jakobson's conundrum." The eleven main chapters of
the book proceed from the general denition of ring composition to
a closer analysis of texts as dierent in age and genre as the Book
of Numbers in the Bible, the Iliad, and Tristram Shandy by
Laurence Sterne.
Instead of the origin of the ring composition in oral culture, ancient
memory techniques or cognitive aspects of human mind, Douglas is
keener to show what she calls the exegetical function of the form:
"It controls meaning, it restricts what is said, and in doing so it
expands meanings along channels it has dug" (13). Apart from
Jakobson, Douglas leans especially on W. A. A. van Otterlo's studies

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on ring composition in Homer, as well as on biblical scholarship

(e.g. Nils Lund, Roland Meynet) regarding the chiastic and circular
rhetoric in the Bible. In Chapter Three Douglas delineates the rules
for the identication of what she considers a ring, and the gradual
formulation of these rules is a rewarding journey for the reader
interested in the poetics and rhetoric of composition. As Douglas
shows, it is not enough to remember that in a ring composition the
meaning is located in the middle and the end corresponds to the
beginning. One also needs more precise tools in order to "identify
the units of text that have to be paired with each other in two
series, the one descending from, the other ascending back to the
beginning" (86). The seven rules suggested by Douglas are then, in
subsequent chapters, applied to alternation of law and narrative in
the Book of Numbers (Chapters Four and Five), the turns of the plot
in Sterne's Tristram Shandy (Chapter Seven), and the multiple
circular layers -- and the alternation of days and nights -- in the Iliad
(Chapters Eight and Nine). Finally, the rules of ring composition are
also discussed by Douglas from the creative writer's point of view,
in other words, as prescriptive rules guiding the author (Chapter
Ten).
The numerous diagrams and tables illustrate Douglas's approach
and make it easy to follow. Nevertheless, it is not always clear
exactly what are the narrative or textual units on which the analysis
is based. What is the "meaning" which is located in the middle of
the ring structure? Or what does the word "item" mean in the
following rule: "To assert a parallel with condence there need to be
at least two distinctive items found in both members of the pair, but
nowhere else" (89)? The answers to these questions may be inferred
from each case study; Douglas is mainly looking for patterned
themes, or plot-based features in the narrated textual worlds rather
than other levels of language or representation. While such other
levels, too, are hinted at here and there -- for example,
non-plot-based aspects such as the phonetic elements of biblical
language, the prosodic features or the so-called prosimetrum form
in epic (116), or the visual geometrical models of gure poems
(131-134) -- it would have been useful to nd a more detailed
discussion of such possible "items," too. Otherwise it could be
counter-argued that a chiasmus or parallel in poetic language often
obeys rules quite dierent from those observable in the plot. The
units may be acoustic, rhetorical, or dictated by the needs of the
performance.1 Regarding the performative aspects, the debate of

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the oral versus the literary nature of ring composition is omitted by

Mary Douglas despite its visibility in recent studies on Homeric,
biblical, or medieval poetry.2
Douglas's essay is an enthusiastic text which has a lot to give to a
general reader. However, a classicist or a student of medieval
narrative patterns in literature might nd superuous the author's
repeated claim (x, 1, 11, 31, 125, et passim) of famous texts having
been misunderstood due to modern (Western) readers' inability to
identify ring composition and misjudge it as chaotic or muddled in
its structure. Among the many major theses of Thinking in Circles I
nd this alleged "trouble recognizing rings" (139) the weakest and
one that hampers the reading of the otherwise rich essay which is
not only a good introduction to ring composition but also to the
thinking of the anthropologist, who always found fascinating ways
to connect detailed textual patterns with broad cultural aspects.
Although Douglas briey mentions "a new interest in ring
composition" (1), she nevertheless seems to ignore much of
research in the eld during the past two or three decades.3
Discussions concerning the ring composition of the Iliad belong to
the commentary tradition not only of epic but also of other classical
genres and rhetorical speeches. (See for instance Mark W.
Edwards's Iliad: A Commentary, vol. V, 1991, as reviewed in this
venue by Robert Schmiel, BMCR 1992.03.05.) Likewise, this literary
scholar would have enjoyed seeing Douglas's anthropological
contribution to and discussion with earlier research on the circular
schemes of time and narration in Laurence Sterne's abundantly
studied masterpiece. Tristram Shandy is a good example of
narrative structures based on both what is actually airmed in the
text but also that which is left unsaid or denarrated: vicious circles
of possible or impossible, conjectural, hypothetical, or other modal
courses of events and the consciousnesses of the characters. Would
such levels and layers of narration qualify for "items" in the
identication of a ring structure, as understood by Douglas? These
questions do not emerge as she detects the circular patterns mainly
in the (actualised) events of the plot and leaves aside the
characteristic temporal and cognitive structures of Sterne's work.
At the very end of the essay (Chapter Eleven) Mary Douglas reverts
once more to the negligence thesis, now in the context of
postmodernism. She sees it as a culture which is "heavily against
boundaries, rules, and closures as such" and therefore "the ring

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shape would seem too formal, articial, mechanical" (146). Yet one
could also claim just the opposite: that postmodern literature is
obsessed by the idea of circularity, given that one recognises its
distinct features in cultivating the art of narrative constraints in the
new old ways. Douglas's method could prove fruitful with authors
such as John Barth (e.g., experimentation with the Moebius strip
structure), Walter Abish, or the Oulipo writers with their
postmodern poetics of creativity which ourishes in chiastic,
circular and other restrictions. These are basic questions which also
motivate Douglas's book as she reviews the possibilities opened up
by the strict formality of ring composition for the "mental discipline"
(115) of creative work.
Mary Douglas's occasional exclamatory style and other speech acts
reveal the essay's origin in the Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation
lectures. Generally speaking, the essayistic mode works well, as it
employs devices observed by Douglas also in the texts under
scrutiny: marked orality and repeated patterns of form and content.
The title and the structure of Thinking in Circles are thus
self-consciously patterned to resist linear argumentative structure,
forming a performance of the very techniques the essay talks about.
However, in order to avoid unwanted repetition (e. g., the same
quote from Jakobson on page 5 and note 1, p. 154), the readers of
Yale University Press could have given the manuscript yet another
look. These are the boring rules of academic essays where
recognition of textual parallelism is not only the reader's associative
joy as in reading Tristram Shandy, but also the editorial crossreferencer's job.
Despite my criticisms regarding some parts of the author's
argumentation and textual detail in the book, the scope of Mary
Douglas's syntheticising thought is admirable. Her relaxed
observations across the centuries and cultural boundaries are
stimulating reading for anyone interested in the patterns of
narrative, a eld which is often characterised by narrow tunnel
vision rather than intercultural and interdisciplinary desire.
Notes:
1. Brian Richardson, "Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms
of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses,"

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in A Companion to Narrative Theory, eds. James Phelan and Peter J.

Rabinowitz. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell 2005.
2. Stephen Nimis, "Ring-Composition and Linearity in Homer," in
Signs of Orality: The Oral Tradition and its Inuence in the Greek
and Roman World, ed. E. Anne Mackay, Leiden: Brill 1999, 65-78.
3. Cf. for instance John D. Niles's article (and ample
documentation of the earlier research tradition) nearly 30 years
ago: "Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf," PMLA 94:5
(1979), 924.

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