Sensing Structure

Ox spent his childhood going to sleep to the sound of piano music of Rachmaninoff, Dvorak, and Brahms.  His mother practiced nightly just after he went to bed.  He absorbed music the easy way.  Now he listens to a new piece of music over and over to make sense of its structure.  I love this repetition and listen that way even when Ox is away; I don’t know enough about music to hear the structure of the work.

I had been a voracious and catholic reader for most of my youth.  In my middle years I read a mystery a night, until I got into the sloppy practice of reading the first few chapters and then the last to see if I’d identified the murderer.  I never thought much about the structure of fiction.  In high school literature classes much attention was paid to symbolism and not much to the structure of stories.  

We are learning to find the structure in short stories in my current fiction writing class.  This is hard for me to grasp.  But sometimes when I’m reading the next assignment a tingle of recognition tickles my neurons and I glimpse at least the ghost of the structure of the work. On the second and third reading, the searched-for structure usually becomes clearer. After all the fiction classes are finished, I'll have to look at Paris Review article authors to discover new (to me) and worthy fiction to read.  It will take discipline to keep looking for structure until I get the knack.

Structure in Painting is less mysterious to me. I know experientially that strong feeling can be conveyed to those who don’t know how to find structure; we don't need to understand it to resonate with a work.  I am beginning to understand, however,  that the joy in a work of art is greatly enhanced by understanding its structure.