NARRATION, CORRESPONDENCES, CIRCULARITY, SIMULTANEITY

by Giulio Mozzi

If you have watched «Stranger Things» you have probably noticed that, in the ending of the last episode of the last season, our heroes, when they return to Mike’s basement to play Dungeons and Dragons, take up the same positions around the table that they occupied in the first episode of the first season; and they make similar gestures. And again: the first episode begins with an armored door opening, from which a person in a white lab coat comes out frightened and running— a lab technician, a scientist? We don’t know yet—while the last image of the last episode is the basement door being closed by Mike.

Are these correspondences narratively necessary? No: if they weren’t there, the story would work just as well. They are extremely important, however, on the symbolic level. The story begins: a door opens. The story ends: a door closes. Everything that happened is now behind us: the story resumes from the point it had reached.

When we build a scene—especially a scene that is not, so to speak, a transitional or functional one, but a key scene—it can be useful to think about its relationship with other scenes. To give other examples: in «Promessi sposi», when the cardinal gives don Abbondio a dressing-down because he did nothing to protect Renzo and Lucia, and tells him that it would have been enough to write to him, and he—he, the cardinal, protected by his role and his authority—could have acted and put don Rodrigo in his place, at a certain point don Abbondio exclaims to himself: «Perpetua’s words!»: because, precisely, in the first chapter Perpetua had given him exactly this advice, to write to the cardinal. Or again: when, in the Lazzaretto, Renzo makes resolutions of vengeance against don Rodrigo, and to lend force to the threat he waves an arm in the air, fra Cristoforo stops him, taking him precisely by the arm: a gesture that recalls the one with which don Rodrigo, many pages earlier, had taken the same fra Cristoforo by the arm at the moment when he had threatened him with divine punishment («A day will come…»). And many other examples could be given.

In Roberto Bolaño’s novel «2666» there is a scene that repeats several times, three if I’m not mistaken: a character—never the same one—is in a hotel room, and while doing something negligible realizes that his image is reflected multiple times in different mirrors: the fingernail-sized mirror near the door, the mirror in the wardrobe door, the bathroom mirror etc.—some of these mirrors do not reflect the character directly, but his reflected image. This repetition suggests an analogy—actually a rather mysterious one—among the characters who experience it; but also an analogy with the structure of the book, whose five parts “mirror” one another in various ways.

It is evident that, when one does these kinds of “reprises” and “mirrorings,” it is not a given that the reader will notice. In Gian Marco Griffi’s novel «Digressione», published by Einaudi last June (and which I know well, having edited it with Greta Bertella), on p. 991 there appears a “yellowish flower”: what are the chances that a reader will remember another “yellowish flower” that appeared on page 14? Not very many, I suppose, even if the scene on page 14 is in any case very briefly evoked again—though without mentioning the flower—a few lines later. On the same page 991, however, the protagonist follows, through the streets of a deserted village, the wandering of a cockroach: and here one can be fairly sure that the reader will remember that something similar had already happened on page 309 and page 337, and, very evidently, on pages 668–676, with a reprise on page 694.

In extremely concise terms we could say: some of these “reprises” are certainly made for the reader, so that the reader grasps the recurrence of something, or the parallel between different scenes—or fragments of scene: a gesture, a line, an arrangement of space; others, instead, are mainly useful to the writer: they help them to organize, to set in order an imaginative world, to give a structure to their narration (structures can be invisible and yet extremely important: in your home, what sense do you have of pillars and beams and systems embedded in the walls? Little, probably; but the house stands and works because there are pillars and beams and systems embedded in the walls). There is nothing wrong with writing, in a novel, something that is only for oneself—let’s say problems begin when we write something for the reader and we don’t put them in a position to notice it. Still in «Digressione», it’s not a big problem if a reader doesn’t notice that the adjective “gonzo,” which appears three times hundreds of pages apart, is reserved for a single character; whereas if the reprise on page 1000 («He lets himself go») of a line on page 345 («I let myself go») were not caught, that really would be a shame.

If you like, it’s something similar to what happens in certain films: where a certain sound, or a certain melody, or a certain musical passage, is tied to a character or a situation or a type of event (but think also of Wagner’s so-called “leitmotifs,” or the use of certain colors in Wes Anderson’s cinema, and so on).

So what’s the point? The point is that narration seems by its nature directed from a beginning to an end; and yet, as we read, we more or less dimly perceive another aspect of its nature: circularity, or more precisely its simultaneity. In some narratives this is heightened—for example in Thomas Bernhard’s novel «Antichi maestri», where everything that is narrated does not happen in the “present” of the narration, but is recalled (and ruminated over) by the narrator in the brief time in which, through the crack of a half-open door, he watches another character looking at a painting; or in certain novels in which the end coincides with the beginning (or explicitly retraces it, as often happens as well in the “happy endings” of popular storytelling, in which the initial order, disturbed by subsequent events, is re-established). But the simultaneity of the whole story is particularly heightened by the calling-back (by symmetry, by symbolism, or by other means) of scenes that are also very far apart (in narrated time, and in the pages of the volume).

In the Gospels—which are among the foundational narratives of the West—it often happens that the narrator emphasizes how a certain event, or a certain act of Jesus of Nazareth, takes place in order to fulfill a prophecy. Even his birth is a fulfillment:

«This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: his mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came to live together she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Joseph her husband, who was righteous and did not want to expose her to disgrace, decided to divorce her quietly. But while he was thinking about these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. […]”. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and he shall be called Emmanuel,” which means “God with us”». (Matthew 1:18–25; the prophecy is in Isaiah 7:14).

In some cases Jesus even cites his own words as if they were a prophecy, for example in John (chapter 18):

«Jesus went out with his disciples beyond the Cedron brook, where there was a garden, into which he entered with his disciples. Judas too, the betrayer, knew the place, because Jesus had often met there with his disciples. So Judas went there, after taking a detachment of soldiers and some guards provided by the chief priests and the Pharisees, with lanterns, torches, and weapons. Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and said to them: “Whom do you seek?”. They answered him: “Jesus the Nazarene.” Jesus said to them: “I am he!”. Judas too, the betrayer, was with them. When he said to them “I am he,” they drew back and fell to the ground. So he asked them again: “Whom do you seek?”. And they said: “Jesus the Nazarene.” Jesus answered: “I told you that I am he. So, if you seek me, let these men go,” so that the word he had spoken might be fulfilled: “Of those whom you gave me I have lost not one”» (the reference, not literal, is to a prayer of Jesus to the Lord, reported shortly before: «I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. […] Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory»: 17:15–26).

So we can say quite calmly that the circularity and/or simultaneity of the events of a story is not some crackpot notion of postmodern fiction: it is, on the contrary, firmly rooted in our literary tradition. Since the Creator is omniscient, and therefore knows everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen, the whole story on one side (on the human side) unfolds in time, but on the other side (on the side of the one who gave it origin) is always entirely co-present: it is an instant, an atom of time.

And it’s no accident that there is a type of narrator we call an “omniscient narrator”…

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If you’re interested in thinking about scenes, about how they are built and about their not only narrative but also symbolic role in narratives, you might consider the possibility of attending the Bottega di narrazione course «Costruire la scena», which from January 31, 2026 will be led by Fiammetta Palpati (for the theoretical part) and Giulio Mozzi (for the workshop part). The link to the full program is this:

Below: a frame from the last episode of «Stranger Things»