Amen to that, say I. Whether or not one goes the whole way with Dennett’s neurophilosophy (and some very prominent neuroscientists do not), he has I think established at very least that when we make up stories or take pleasure in made-up stories, we are literally doing what comes naturally.
NOW, THEN, I ask you: Did the pondering of questions like these ever make anybody a better writer? Wouldn’t any fictionist be just as well off following the example of Norman Mailer, say, who in his 1984 Hopwood Lecture declared his tendency “to mumble about technical matters like an old mechanic”? “‘Let’s put the thingamajig before the whoosits here,’” said Mailer, “is how I usually state the deepest literary problems to myself.” Same here, more often than not, when I am in actual intimate congress with the muse. It’s in the recovery-time between such sessions that I incline to put such questions more formally to myself and to entertain them from others. And I happen to believe that when we do that, too, we’re doing what comes naturally — perhaps more naturally to some people than to others.
But I suppose that that goes without saying.
Any further questions?
Incremental Perturbation
Some further “Further Questions.” This little essay — written for and first published in an anthology on fiction-writing compiled by one of my former graduate students1—should be skipped by any who’ve heard enough already about the mechanics of storytelling.
What’s a story?
Storytellers (it goes without saying) tell stories. Fiction-writers write them; playwrights and screenwriters script them; opera singers sing them; balletists dance them; mimes mime them. But what’s a story?
Damned if I know, for sure. “A whole action, of a certain magnitude,” says Aristotle in effect in his Poetics. “A meaningful series of events in a time sequence,” say Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their New-Critical textbook Understanding Fiction.
Yes, well. But. .
Most working writers of fiction — myself included when the muse and I are at it — operate less by articulated narrative theory than by the hunch and feel of experience: our experience of successfully (sometimes unsuccessfully) composing, revising, and editing our own stories and, prerequisite to that, our experience of the tens of thousands of stories that all of us audit, read, spectate, and more or less assimilate in the course of our lives. But it’s another matter when, as teachers of novice fiction-writers and coaches of more advanced apprentices in the art, we find ourselves in the position of trying to explain to them and to ourselves why the manuscript before us, whatever its other merits, lacks something that we’ve come to associate with stories, and is in our judgment the less satisfying for that lack. “Gets off on the wrong foot,” somebody in the room may opine. “Something askew in the middle there. . ” “The ending bothers me. . ”
Okay: But exactly what about the beginning, the middle, the ending, fails to satisfy? What keeps the thing from achieving proper storyhood? Freud remarks that he didn’t start out with such peculiar notions as the Oedipus Complex; that he was driven to their articulation by what he was hearing from the psychoanalytical couch. That’s how I feel with respect to dramaturgical theory.
What’s dramaturgy?
In my shop, “dramaturgy” means the management of plot and action; the architecture of Story, as distinct from such other fictive goodies as Language, Character, Setting, and Theme. Be it understood at the outset that mere architectural completeness, mere storyhood, doth not an excellent fiction make. Every competent hack hacks out complete stories; structural sufficiency is hackhood’s first requirement. On the other hand, about a third of Franz Kafka’s splendid fictions, for example, and a somewhat smaller fraction of Donald Barthelme’s, happen to be “mere” extended metaphors rather than stories — metaphors elaborated to a certain point and then, like lyric poems, closed — and they are no less artistically admirable for that.2 Such exceptions notwithstanding, the fact is that most of the fiction we admire is admirable dramaturgically as well as in its other aspects. If we admire a piece of prose fiction despite its non-storyhood, we are, precisely, admiring it despite its non-storyhood. Even the late John Gardner — by all accounts a splendid writing teacher despite his cranky notions of “moral fiction”—used to advise, “When in doubt, go for dramaturgy.” Amen to that.
Back to Aristotle: The distinction between Plot and Action can be useful to what we might call clinical dramaturgical analysis, since a story’s problems may lie in the one but not the other. As a classroom exercise, one can summarize the story of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, for example, entirely in terms of its plot with little or no reference to its action: “A happily married and much-respected head of state comes to learn that his eminent position is owing to his having unwittingly broken two major-league taboos, and in a day his fortunes are reversed.” Clearly, any number of imaginable sequences of action might body forth that summarized plot. One then proceeds to examine for efficiency and effect the particular sequence chosen by Sophocles to do the job. Indeed, one may summarize the drama contrariwise, entirely in terms of its action with little or no reference to its plot: “A delegation of Theban elders complains to King Oedipus that a plague has fallen upon the place. The King sends his brother-in-law to the Delphic oracle to find out what’s going on. That emissary returns with news of the gods’ displeasure. The chorus of elders sings and dances apprehensively,” et cetera.
Aristotle’s stipulations that the action be 1) “whole” and 2) “of a certain magnitude” can be at least marginally useful, too: A “whole” action includes everything necessary to constitute a meaningful story and excludes anything irrelevant thereto — got that? “Of a certain magnitude” means that the action of fiction ought not to be inconsequential, however much it might appear to the characters to be so. But if we ask “What’s the meaning of meaningful?” or “What do you mean by consequential?”, it turns out that meaningful means “dramaturgically meaningful” and consequential means “dramaturgically consequential,” and around we go (likewise with Brooks and Warren’s “meaningful series of events,” even without their redundant “in a time sequence”). One is tempted to chuck the whole question and go back to good old Hunch and Feel — but these preliminary distinctions and definitions are worth bearing in mind as we try to spiral out of their circularity, mindful that what we’re interested in here is not “mere” theory, but practical dramaturgy: Applied Aristotle.
The curve of dramatic action.
Not all fictive action is dramatic, either in the colloquial sense of “exciting” or in the practical sense of advancing the story’s plot. And drama, to be sure, involves those other elements aforementioned — character and theme and language as well as action — although it’s worth remembering that the Greek word drama literally means “deed,” an action performed by a character, and that Aristotle declares in effect that it’s easier to imagine a drama without characters 3 than one without action, the without-which-nothing of story. Dramatic action is conventionally described as “rising” to some sort of climactic “peak” or turning-point and then “falling” to some sort of resolution, or denouement. In short, as a sort of triangle — not really of the isosceles variety sometimes called “Fichte’s triangle” after the late-18th-century German philosopher, but more like a stylized profile of Gibraltar viewed (in left-to-right cultures, anyhow) from the west: