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On Symmetries: My Visual Novel (1985)

The simple line and its development in purely geometrical regularity was bound to offer the greatest possibility of happiness to the man disquieted by the obscurity and entanglement of phenomena.

—Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1908)

Two radical qualities distinguishing my artistic work are that I sometimes use symmetry, along with other rigorous systems (that are purportedly contrary to the spirit of Art), and that I write poems and fictions with materials other than syntactical sentences (that are purportedly the basis of Literature), which is to say that I have made both poems and fictions out of isolated words, non-syntactic sequences, numbers, and uninflected lines.

Symmetries is a novel, composed in the language of lines and divided into three chapters, each considerably longer than its immediate predecessor. Its “setting” is three generations of rectilinear grids that do not change; its three principal “characters” are a diagonal line that leans 45 degrees to the left, a diagonal line that leans 45 degrees to the right, and a circle. These figures in their various symmetrical arrangements enact not only a single sustained narrative but numerous subplots of varying length, all of which incorporate, among other motifs, antagonism and resolution. One structure distinguishing Symmetries from conventional fiction is that its sequences can be read in both directions; either cover can be considered its “front” or its “back.”

The principal theme of Symmetries is that system informing its composition; each part epitomizes a form that embodies the content. Just as each page is a component of the whole, which could be described as an exhaustive permutational exploration of a single general statement about four-sided geometrical symmetries, so each image, though visibly different from all the others, incorporates characteristics common to all parts of the entire work. Simple and skeletal in certain respects, Symmetries is quite complex and full in others; it is also perhaps the most complete realization of certain visionary principles that have informed my fiction for the past dozen years.

What makes symmetrical forms more attractive than asymmetrical is not only their balance and proportional harmony but their capacity for a precise narrative development that is eventually resolved. Exhaustibility—both visually, within a single image, and sequentially, from image to image—can be as esthetically satisfying as symmetry. A secondary theme of Symmetries is change and constancy—the enormous variety of related scenes within a single encompassing idea; that is also a secondary theme of War and Peace, among other novels.

Symmetries is composed more strictly than a conventional novel, for every image has an empirically irreplaceable location in the entire work. Within terms of the whole, no single image can be considered superfluous. The system is at once a constraint that forbids both short cuts and arbitrary turns in the plot and yet a generative form that brings a narrative to an appropriate conclusion. As an extended example of my “Constructivist Fiction,” Symmetries can be internationally understood. For publication elsewhere in the world, nothing more than its title need be translated.

This novel should appear in a book whose format is 4” high and 14” wide, with four images running across its page; so when opened flat the book would reveal a 28” sequence of eight drawings stretched horizontally across the two-page spread. With 392 separate images, the narrative would begin (and end) with a sequence of four images on each of its covers and run for 96 pages.