I love circles, especially in writing, where the author cycles back at the end of an essay or book to a reference from the opening. Joseph Campell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces defined this pattern in drama, myth, and religious ritual: a protagonist, forced from home, leaves the ordinary world to enter a frightening new region, survives ordeals, and returns home transformed.
What is it about this type of storytelling that has compelled people for thousands of years? The template of circularity, which we experience in nature, feels deeply familiar, calling up a visceral response. There's a satisfaction to the echo, to seeing the familiar again, only recast as something new.
The Wizard of Oz is a famous example. Dorothy, beset by a nasty neighbor who’s snatched her beloved dog Toto, is thrust by a tornado into a phantasmagorical journey; after coming home she views familiar faces and places with fresh, appreciative eyes. Alice in Wonderland similarly opens with Alice playing on a riverbank before she slides down the rabbit hole into a surreal adventure, ending only when her sister wakens her and she’s back on the riverbank.
Myths like Homer’s Odyssey often follow this cyclical form, as does James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake may be the most dramatic instance of the pattern, where the first sentence literally completes its final one. The end comes out of the beginning, not arising from nowhere in an arbitrary fashion. The seeds of the ending lie in the beginning, so it becomes a promise fulfilled.
In my novel Mama’s Child I opened with the scene of a woman mailing a furious letter, cutting off contact with her mother. The book closes with the same woman seated at her desk fourteen years later, writing a letter of rapprochement. The letter, in its repetition, becomes a signifier for the theme of the book: communication and relationship. Reviving the letter in its transformed state, from conveying a message of anger to one of reconciliation, provides an echoing resonance. As a writer I found this highly satisfying. Circling back to the beginning, the final scene mirrors the first, yet is not a duplicate since both daughter and mother have experienced significant change.
What I find so appealing about the cyclical structure is that its protagonists are generally regenerated by their journeys. Like the seasons.
I’m a gardener as well as a storyteller. Each fall and winter I’m delighted anew to spot tiny leaf buds at the roots of anemones, whose withered stalks I’m cutting. “Look!” I shout to my family, astonished still after twenty-five California winters. “See the new buds.” There in the midst of dead brown leaves this sign of new life sprouts: a promise of a revivified spring to come. I strive for the same vitalizing force in my writing, hoping to stimulate generative thoughts and feelings in readers, as well as myself.
Circles, signifying a unity of “no beginning, no end,” wholeness and completeness, provide me an intuitively natural pattern for writing. As the monkey Rafiki sings in opening The Lion King and Simba the lion affirms at the end, after his heartbreaking journey, “The Circle of Life” endures.
August Wilson’s character Doub in his play Jitney sums it up perfectly, “Time go along and it come around.” May those of you drawn to this ancient art form enjoy experimenting with its many possibilities.