Og the caveman awoke from uneasy dreams to discover that he was in a narrative.
Narratives are one-dimensional. We speak of the narrative thread, using as a metaphor an archetypal one-dimensional object. Text pages are two-dimensional out of convenience, the conventional margins serving as the skytale around which the text winds, but without the steganography a second dimension might provide.
Even illustrations in text like this:
It is only when we attempt to construct meaning from narrative that a second dimension of association and metaphor appears. Here is my intent for the two-dimensional version of the first sentence:
| Og | proper name/humorous |
| the caveman | contextualizes and excuses the jarring proper name/renders it cliche (unlike "Og the French ambassador") |
| awoke from uneasy dreams | "Metamorphosis" |
and so on.
Yet the second dimension is tenuous, no matter how fastidiously the writer clothes his narrative in metaphor. Suppose you hadn't read Kafka. "awoke from uneasy dreams" might have no effect at all. Suppose you recalled the sentence, but believed it was from The Odyssey. Where I want you to think of narrative, alienation, and the illusory, your ears are filled with the roaring of wine-dark seas and perhaps Tennyson and eagles. Suppose a sequence of words were an unconscious reference to a work I had read and forgotten, but that you remember.
But if the second dimension isn't under the control of the author, the narrative most definitely is. In fact, the narrative is overloaded with control.
I want you to believe these words, to accept this argument. And the flow of this sentence, like it or not, is what I want to write, not what you want to read. I am constrained only partly by grammar; my sentence-generating device can stop right here, or it could continue on, branching and expanding (all the while perfectly grammatically) and end only when I will it to, which I nearly do, with any old word at all, for example, fish.
When I use narrative to describe a system, my meaning is confounded by my desire to control and your desire to be controlled. Willing suspension of disbelief is willing suspension of control. I maintain your willingness as Aristotle well knew by maintaining the unities (and what are the unities but a lecture on dimensionality?), and by refraining from dragging fish into the matter.
But I am the victim of this narrative as much as you. Were I to describe the arrangement, the colors, the shapes of the buildings in Chicago, I could not write it clearly enough to show what Figure 1 shows. You would misunderstand what I said, or I might even express it wrongly and not catch the error when I proofread it. One-dimensional narrative is lousy for expressing two-dimensional things.
It's as though we wanted to make a roadmap out of string. If you wanted me to travel on certain roads, a mark of one color could symbolize a left turn, a mark of another could symbolize a right turn, and distance could be represented by an agreed-upon scale. Within the constraints of my following your expressed will for the journey, I might make it to my destination.
Yet if I were to ask "how close will I come to Chicago traveling this way" or any question that would reveal the understanding of the real system (the surface of part of the earth) conveyed by the one-dimensional map, we'd have to agree that one-dimensional things simply don't map very well to two-dimensional things.
In my problem from the previous section, describing a complex system, we now see that even a second dimension in the system (say, a branch in a graph of a linear process) can only with great difficulty be described in narrative, though I think I can use narrative to explain why the graph ought to branch.
And in the control that is commingled with the nature of narrative, we might both be deceived into believing that we both understand the system and that it's workable, when in fact neither is true.