Literary fugue

A while back I embarked on my third or forth attempt to read Godel, Escher, Bach. I failed.

It’s one of those books, maybe the only one of those books, in fact, that I get a hundred page into it and I think, “it’s brilliant, I’m not.”

Still, it’s a rich source of ideas. One is the idea of fugue, which is a major theme in the book. I’m not going to even try to explain the technical definition of fugue from a musical standpoint, but it’s basically a peice of music in which a basic theme is played then repeated and elaborated on as the song continues and new voices chime in.

Fugue is an evolution of canon, a basic musical round, like we all learn in elementary school - remember Row, row, row your boat? But where the canon is characterized by simple repetition, fugue involves repetition with intense manipulation of the original melody.

It occurs to me that literary works often contain examples of fugue. A theme is introduced and repeated later in a different form. The tie between them can thought of as allegory. For instance: a boy learns from a wise old hermit that sometimes you can’t avoid snakes, so you must kill them; the boy later decides the only way to deal with his abusive teachers is to kill him.

Take the Karate Kid: wax on, wax off; he later wins the karate match with the same skills. What is learned early in the story, is conveyed to another situation later in the story.

In Narrative Discourse, Gerard Genette approaches this subject in his chapter on the order of events in a narrative. He discusses how Proust played with the timing of events in his stories to draw a comparison between things that happened at different times but relate closely to one another in meaning.

In some cases Proust does this to contrast the past and present. For instance, a character, look at a row of trees reports, “I recognized that what seemed to me now so delightful was that same row of trees which I had found tedious to both observe and to describe.” This contrast suggests a change in the character - the movement of the narrative.

The repetition could also serve to draw an analogy. The words of a character can repeat thos of another character, thereby making it clear they share some important characteristic. Or, say, a woman recognizes that a man is nice because he picks flowers for children, just the way her much beloved grandfather used to.

In general, the literary fugue, if that’s what we’re to call it, takes meanings established previous in a narrative and repeates them in a new form (as an analogy or allegory, for instance) later in the narrative to suit some purpose.

It occurs to me that the movie Ground Hog day, in which Bill Murray’s character experiences the same day over and over again, is an example of this. The humor comes from his more or less succesful attempts to navigate the same situation again and again. Any story in which the character learns from a situation and uses what he’s learned later on to succeed also uses fugue.

I wonder what the technical literary term for this is? It’s seems so fundamental to story telling that it’s bound to have a name.

Discerning the purpose is the tricky part.