Pentalogy


A pentalogy is a compound literary or narrative work that is explicitly divided into five parts. Although modern use of the word implies both that the parts are reasonably self-contained and that the structure was intended by the author, historically, neither was necessarily true: in fact, a pentalogia could be assembled by a later editor, just as Plotinus's Enneads were arranged in nines by Porphyry in order to create an overarching structure of six which would express the idea of perfection.

Overview

In Western literature, the oldest quinary structure with great influence is the Torah or Pentateuch; in the Far East, it is the Five Classics. The most famous pentalogy in medieval literature is Nizami Ganjavi's Panj Ganj, or Khamsa, a collection of five epics which was composed in the latter half of the 12th century. They were Makhzan al-Asrar, Khusraw o Shirin, Layli o Majnun, Eskandar-nameh, and Haft Paykar. The idea was widely imitated, the number five being seen as having mystical significance; for example, the 16th-century poet Faizi, the poet laureate of Akbar's court, attempted a work on the same scale, but completed only three of the intended five parts. Other famous examples include Amir Khusro: Khamsa-e-Nizami, a pentalogy of classical romances, and Ali-Shir Nava'i: Khamsa.
The fivefold structure is usually first encountered by an English-speaking reader in the plays of William Shakespeare, which, like nearly all English, French and German plays of the period, are divided into five acts, even when the narrative of the play hardly seems to demand it; in his Essay on Comedy, George Meredith wrote sardonically that "Five is dignity with a trailing robe; whereas one, or two, or three acts would be short skirts, and degrading." The origin of this tradition was examined by Brander Matthews in A Book about the Theater. It could be traced to Horace:
Brander explains that Horace came to this conclusion on the basis of the drama of Euripides:
Lawrence Durrell's pentalogy The Avignon Quintet is an example of the reappearance of numerological ideas in modern fiction. In an attempt to subvert the normal linear structure, Durrell explicitly specified it as a quincunx and related it to the Gnostical interpretations. The best-known discussion of this shape in English literature is Thomas Browne's essay The Garden of Cyrus, which relies on Pythagorean traditions, but Durrell goes much further afield, relating it to Angkor Wat and the Kundalini. The purpose of the work was to go beyond his previous tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet. In an interview, Durrell agreed with James P. Carley that "Christianity as we know it is a quaternity with a suppressed fourth" and a critic describes his ambition as being that of "achieving the 'quintessence', that is in its combination of Eastern spirituality and Western science leading to the global vision of 'Reality Prime'."

Literary examples

Adams died suddenly in 2001 while planning a sixth book, so And Another Thing..., was written by Eoin Colfer in 2009 to resolve the cliffhanger which ended the fifth.