Image: Representation of The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares in How to Draw a Novel

Structure’s Ghost

Of all the ghosts that inhabit the novel, structure is one of the most elusive. It is also the most exquisite. It tends to appear in the work’s earliest moments of gestation, when the author’s intuition is vast, or right in the final stretch, when the final piece of the puzzle falls into place. It might take the form of a straight line, a chain of illusions, the branches of a tree, a circle that returns to its origin, an improvisation that rises like smoke and draws shapes in the air, a many-headed hydra, a chorus sung by many, a swarm of tempestuous memories, a river of surprises and word games, delicate berries from the forest or the daunting avalanche of fate, the struggle between heroes and villains, an equation rich in dramatic tension, or a mystery tackled by several minds.

And yet, none of these forms is possible if the fiction doesn’t follow coherent architectural principles that add meaning to the story, stir our emotions, and avoid introducing random elements where none are called for. Contradictory as it might seem, there are specific places in the haunted house of fiction where the ghosts should appear. Every narrative should be designed so these seemingly spontaneous apparitions have the greatest impact as they go about their routines and show up at the precise moment the author conjures them. This is one of the greatest paradoxes that govern fiction.

One would have every right to believe that so much calculation and architecture are impossible and ill-suited to artistic creation, or even that analyzing the path taken by the narrative could be detrimental, but the interest in a story’s structure is nearly as old as the first novels or Greek poems. What is Ovid describing in chapter six of Metamorphoses if not the essence of the art of storytelling when the competing Arachne and Minerva weave threads of their tales into their respective tapestries? And what, if not the earliest inklings of the elements present in the novel, does Longus describe for us in the prologue to Daphnis and Chloe?

One illustrious example of this can be seen in an eighteenth-century novel. At the beginning of Tristram Shandy, in the famous and brief fourteenth chapter of the first book, Laurence Sterne halts the narrative to sketch a bunch of scribbles as tangled as cords from a fallen spool; these are supposed to represent the path his story had taken up to that moment. Sterne describes a paradox that deserves to bear his name: each time he tried to make his narrative follow a specific path, the twists and turns of the story conspired to betray him, growing quickly in unexpected directions like rebellious vines, taking him further and further from his initial objective. This is why Tristram Shandy seems to be made from living matter, restless and insubordinate, that refuses to follow conventional paths or procedures.

Kurt Vonnegut did something similar at the end of the twentieth century in his famous discourse on the form of the novel, which appears in A Man without a Country as a text that begins, “Here is a lesson in creative writing.” There, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five does not describe the direction of a story or the rebellion of the matter it consists of, the way Laurence Sterne does, as much as he depicts the changing fortunes of the protagonists of different works of fiction, and the rush we feel when we learn the details of their fate. Made with a single, fluid line, Vonnegut’s diagrams offer three possibilities along the way: a fall, an ascent, and a narrative plateau without ups or downs. These three basic paths can be combined with one another; by charting them, Vonnegut managed to explain how most fictions work, from “Little Red Riding Hood” to The Metamorphosis. According to Vonnegut, in some stories everything is terrible at first and the protagonist seems to be in freefall, but then he finds a way to turn things around, his luck improves, and he gets what he was after: these are the novels with happy endings—if they’re told well, they leave the reader happy. Then there are stories that start out well enough, but things go wrong: at first, we seem to be reading about a real winner, but then something happens, and the protagonist and his desires suffer an enormous reversal of fortune, falling far below his expectations with no hope of turning things around, despite his best attempts. These novels end badly, leaving a bitter taste in the reader’s mouth, though sometimes with notes of perfection.

With his wonderful diagrams, Vonnegut shows that it is possible to draw the feelings provoked by the adventures and misadventures of a fictional character as if we were looking at them through a telescope. Sterne, on the other hand, holds a magnifying glass up to the digressions that the story’s raw materials might insist on making. Broadly speaking, we get the sense, however, that the twists and turns of the stories we read can be represented with a single stroke. To illustrate this point, we’re going to visit a few haunted houses, built between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries in the northern reaches of the American continent.



The Legendary White Whale

Let’s begin with a majestic novel that has no fewer than one hundred epigraphs, one of the most ambitious tales ever written, which demands weeks of attention from its readers, a story told in 135 chapters—41 of which don’t actually advance the plot but instead interrupt it with essays about whale hunting. It may be hard to believe, but almost one-third of the narrative bulk of Moby-Dick is a direct assault on the most basic narrative principles, insofar as it brings the story to a grinding halt at some of its most exciting moments, as if an encyclopedia were taking over an adventure novel. The result is a novel just as monstrous and unpredictable as the monster being hunted in its pages.

As readers of Ishmael’s diary know, this novel does not mention a single date but instead recounts the highlights of the adventure: how the sailors were interviewed and hired on Nantucket; under what conditions they shipped out; how many months they spent tracking whales; how they saw a giant squid; how many days on average it would take the crew of the Pequod to process and store each part of the whale; how they hunted their first sperm whale and how fiercely they fought over their prize with another ship that claimed it; how the Pequod crossed paths with the Bachelor, the Rachel, the Delight, the Samuel Enderby, and other ships that looked increasingly battered the closer they got to Moby Dick; how a harpooner named Queequeg killed a respectable number of sharks unassisted, and how another, named Tashtego, fell into the open cranium of a cetacean and was rescued from certain death by his shipmates; how young Pip went mad, left to his fate on the open ocean; why Ahab promised a gold doubloon to the first man to sight the white whale, and which crew member collected; how they were visited by an ominous waterspout, and how they listened for hours to the cries of shipwrecked sailors through a strange, impenetrable fog; how Fedallah prophesied Ahab’s destiny and those three fateful days when three whale boats full of crew set out after the white whale and not one of them returned intact. Above all, the novel recounts how many days a man’s soul can waver between good and evil before he faces his destiny.

Moby-Dick is made from two types of material. There are the chapters of unmatched velocity composed of pure action, where we follow the crew of the Pequod in their search for the white whale, living from one calamity to the next. And then there are the parts that halt the action of the novel to give us heavy doses of practical information. In the former, the story takes us to an unpredictable, violent place where each element of the landscape announces the evils in store for the Pequod: mysterious sailors emerge from secret cabins aboard the ship; false prophets foretell unparalleled horrors; a magus demands a nearly impossible ritual in order to defeat the white whale; and, in the novel’s final pages, a desperate captain baptizes in the name of Satan the harpoon he plans to use on the leviathan. The encyclopedic chapters, on the other hand, tend to pop up unexpectedly and—after giving us a monumental knock with their tail—stop the story in its tracks and immerse us in an intensive course in whale hunting. Written in a wise and witty style, these chapters seem drawn from Melville’s experience during his years on a whaling vessel and stand out for the elegance and erudition of their prose and, above all, for the narrator’s enviably wry humor.

The problem, for many readers, is when these materials meet. How can we be expected to tolerate the interruption of a race between two whaling ships to catch the same sperm whale? Worse still, instead of this chase we’re given an essay that lists the appearances of whales in paintings and literature throughout the centuries. Why interrupt a moment when the sailors are risking their lives to capture a monster of the deep to explain in detail how jurisprudence applies on the high seas, or to describe the industryrecommended way to carve up a whale? And, of course, who in their right mind would dedicate a whole chapter to the structure of a sperm whale skull while dozens of hungry sharks are fighting the whalers for possession of the beast?

In the first half of Moby-Dick, fiction and nonfiction compete for the reader’s affections. The book’s first chapters, which bubble over with excitement as our protagonist travels to New Bedford and from there to Nantucket to ship out with a whaling vessel, alternate with perfect little treatises on our image of the sperm whale: the imprecise paintings that try to capture their likeness and the legends that attribute magical qualities to their spouts, which few mortals have glimpsed. While Ishmael and Queequeg speed across distant seas, the narrator dives deeper and deeper into the smallest details so we know everything there is to know about this greatest of monsters when the time finally comes to face him. The line that traces this back-and-forth between speed and depth, between anecdote and information, would be a wild zigzag, like the kind a big fish cuts through the water on the high seas.

Disturbed by this strategy, many have given up on the book after a few pages, not realizing that its author is preparing us to hunt prey that uses two contradictory modes of escape: speeding away across the surface of the water, then suddenly diving into the deep. Little by little, the narrator turns us into the most uncommon of readers: fans of adventure who also embrace the adventure of depth.

Something strange happens right around the middle of the story: the sailors finally catch sight of the white whale—the monster they’ve been chasing from one rumor to the next, from one catastrophe to the next, for months on end. We’ve been warned of the approaching danger by mad prophets, magi, and the captains of other whaling ships that have lost boats full of crew to the white whale. But the novelist’s technique suddenly changes the moment the whale is sighted, to the extent that time seems to stand still. If the first half of the novel gives us the history of man and whale over centuries, we are about to be given the story of these whalers in a flash. Though nothing signals that anything like this is about to happen, we suddenly leave Ishmael’s head and his notes behind and are confronted with all the secret trepidations of the Pequod’s crew as, one by one, they explain to us what is going through their minds in that singular moment when they realize they are about to come face to face with their greatest fear. In this unusual chapter, eleven monologues of terror and awe, of curiosity and shock, pass before our eyes with the force of a crashing wave. The hermetic Captain Ahab, his first mate Starbuck, noble Stubb, beleaguered Flask, the harpooner Queequeg, the sailor Pip, the witness Ishmael, two anonymous cabin boys, and even the magus Fedallah all speak, one after another.

Things couldn’t possibly go on as before after all these secrets are revealed, and the novel indeed undergoes a fundamental transformation: speed and depth board the same whale boat headed into the fray. Melville changes his strategy and displays his mastery of the art of digression. Once the white whale has been sighted, instead of inserting brief essays on whaling in the voice of an invisible narrator safely tucked away from the action, the author chooses one of the characters dearest to the reader (Tashtego, Queequeg, Stubbs, or Starbuck) and forces him into an extraordinary and dangerous circumstance in which his only hope of survival rests on his detailed knowledge of certain secrets of the maritime world. Far from interfering with plot development, the explanations that seemed alien to the central story and completely unrelated to the adventures of the Pequod become indispensable for understanding the complexity and charm of each particular challenge. The author is transformed, just like his readers. In the middle of his novel, Melville creates an addiction to the same notes that seemed like such a trial at first.

Whoever gets to the second half of the novel will understand how the narration of the Pequod’s adventures absolutely had to occur at the same time as the meticulous explanations of whaling in order to give us this story lifesized. In the second half of the novel, Moby-Dick is not made of oil and water, of story and digression: it is made from a single curious substance that is constantly bubbling over, advancing and exploding upward like whale spout. Moby-Dick looks like a novel, but it is actually a radical lesson in the beauty and necessity of digressions; it not only asserts the necessity of the digressions we call novels, it also asks us whether life itself might not be a novel of uneven and unpredictable proportions.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

“Structure’s Ghost” is excerpted from How to Draw a Novel © 2023 by Martín Solares. English translation © 2023 by Heather Cleary. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.

​Pre-order How to Draw a Novel here. 
Publication Date: December 12, 2023.

MARTÍN SOLARES is the author of the novels The Black Minutes and Don’t Send Flowers, which was a finalist for France’s most prestigious award for crime fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and for the distinguished Spanish-language award, the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. He lives in Mexico City.



HEATHER CLEARY is based in New York and Mexico City. She is the author of The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction, and her translations include Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (winner, English PEN Award), Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets (finalist, Best Translated Book Award), Poems to Read on a Streetcar by Girondo (recipient, PEN and Programa SUR translation grants), and Brenda Lozano’s Witches, among others. She has served on the jury of the National Book Award in Translation, the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, and the PEN Translation Award. A founding editor of the multi-lingual Buenos Aires Review and founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translation collective, she holds an MA in Comparative Literature from NYU and a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.