In Praise of Circles: Reading Daniel Mendelsohn's Three Rings

Abstract

In Praise of Circles: Reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings* KAREN SIMONS When i first began reading Daniel Mendelsohn ’s Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate in the spring of 2021, I felt I’d come home. After leaving sessional employment as an English instructor several years ago, I have until recently been engaged in research for the Anglican Diocese of Edmonton—interesting work in its way, but far from my literary roots. In Three Rings, I met with many old acquaintances from my student years in classics and English: Homer, Herodotus , Erich Auerbach, Friedrich August Wolf, and others. And Mendelsohn’s warm, intimate tone created the illusion of a literary conversation, only too welcome during pandemic restrictions . So I read, at first, in a cozy haze of nostalgia. But when I finished the book, I closed it, sat quietly for a moment, then got up and went to my computer to email some friends. “I just read a very slim book that contains a very large world,” I wrote. “It is a ‘study’ or meditation or journey through and by ‘ring composition ,’ by digressions into and about the lives of three writers linked to the Odyssey and about wanderings of their own (and the author’s own) and so much more. It’s impossible to describe, but it is utterly moving and mind-stretching.” In deciding to write this essay, then, I have taken on an impossible task: describing the indescribable. When I read the book again, both because it deserves a second reading and because I wanted to write about it, I paid more attention to its workings: how is it constructed? The short answer is arion 29.2 fall 2021 *Daniel Mendelsohn, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020. 113 pages. 126 in praise of circles “ring composition,” but how does Mendelsohn use it? What does it allow him to do? What does he say about it? What, finally, is the book “about”? In his previous book, An Odyssey : A Father, A Son, and An Epic, Mendelsohn provides a definition of “ring composition” that helpfully anticipates its function in Three Rings: As complex as it is to describe this technique, the associative spirals that are its hallmark in fact re-create the way we tell stories in everyday life, looping from one tale to another as we seek to clarify and explain the story with which we started, which is the story to which, eventually, we will return . . . . And so ring composition, which might at first glance appear to be a digression, reveals itself as an efficient means for a story to embrace the past and the present and sometimes even the future —since some “rings” can loop forward, anticipating events that take place after the conclusion of the main story. In this way, a single narrative, even a single moment, can contain a character’s entire biography. Hence the occurrence of the word polytropos, “of many turns,” “many circled,” in the first line of the Odyssey is a hint as to the nature not only of the poem’s hero but of the poem itself, suggesting as it does that the best way to tell a certain kind of story is to move not straight ahead but in wide and history-laden circles. (32-33)1 As in An Odyssey, the narration in Three Rings does not move straight ahead but in wide and history-laden circles generated by the associative imagination, so that a single moment can contain a character’s entire biography. But Three Rings pushes the technique further, going well beyond biography to cover huge territories of time, space, and emotion, and mingling many genres—memoir, biography, history, criticism —as other reviewers have noted. In a mere 113 pages, Mendelsohn’s wandering narrative traverses his childhood, his journey to visit Holocaust memorials and interview survivors , his own experiences of despair, stories of expulsion and of refugees who have fled across Europe in one direction Karen Simons 127 or another over the centuries, Istanbul, the Odyssey, the origins of the discipline of philology, and the lives and works of exiles and...