. A ramp, let’s say, which the story’s “rising action” rather gradually ascends to a peak and then precipitately descends (punch lines are normally shorter than their jokes). Add to this ramp a bit of an approach and a bit of an exit—
—and you’ve graphed the Ingredients of Story as conventionally formulated: Exposition (the information requisite to understanding the action, or, as I prefer to put it, the “ground situation”: a dramatically voltaged state of affairs pre-existing the story’s present time), Conflict (or, in my shop, the introduction of the “dramatic vehicle”: a present-time turn of events that precipitates a story out of the ground situation), Complication (of which more presently), Climax, Denouement, and Wrap-Up (the little coda, closing fillip, or dolly-back shot often appended to the denouement like a jazz drummer’s “roll-off” at the end of a number, and usually suggestive of what the story’s completed action portends for the principal characters).
Seems arbitrary, doesn’t it, this curveless classic curve: an uncomfy-looking Bed of Procrustes upon which the action of fiction must be stretched or chopped to fit, or else. Or else what? Why not a story whose action graphs like this—
—or this—
—or that tracks more or less like Lawrence Sterne’s diagrammed flourishes of Uncle Toby’s walking-stick in Tristram Shandy—
—or that simply flat-lines start to finish (___________)? In fact, that question touches a genuine mystery, in my opinion — and of course one can readily point to stories like the aforementioned Tristram Shandy that appear to proceed aimlessly, randomly, anyhow un-Aristotelianly; that digress repeatedly while in fact never losing sight of where they’re going: up the old ramp to their climax and denouement. For practical purposes, however, the matter’s no more mysterious than why one doesn’t normally begin a joke with its punch line, a concert program or fireworks display with its pièce de résistance, a meal with its chef d’oeuvre, a session of lovemaking with its orgasm: Experience teaches that they simply aren’t as effective that way, and “the rules of art,” as David Hume remarked, are grounded Edward Albee has “not in reason, but in experience.” Edward Albee has declared his preference for stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, “preferably in that order.” Quite so — once one allows for another classical tradition, this one best articulated not by Aristotle but by Horace in his Ars Poetica: the tradition of beginning in medias res, in the middle of things rather than at their chronological Square One. To tell the story of the fall of Troy, says Horace, we need not begin ab ovo: “from the egg” laid by Leda after her ravishment by Zeus-in-the-form-of-aswan, and from which hatched among others fair Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships, et cetera, et cetera. We might begin not even with the opening hostilities of the Trojan War itself, but rather — like Homer — in the ninth year of that disastrous ten-year enterprise, and then interstitch our Exposition retrospectively as we proceed.
In other words, the dramaturgical Beginning need not be and in fact seldom is the chronological beginning, and a story’s order of narration (or a play’s order of dramatization) need not be the strict chronological order of the events narrated. Dramatic effect, not linear chronology, is the regnant principle in the selection and arrangement of a story’s action.
Isomorphs.
Apprentice story-makers may need reminding, however, that the world contains many things whose structure or progress resembles (“is isomorphic to” has a nice pedagogical ring) that of traditional dramaturgy. I have mentioned jokes, concert programs, pyrotechnical displays, multicourse meals, and lovemaking when things go well; one could add coffee-brewing (an old percolator of mine used to begin my every workday with a rising action that built to a virtual percolatory orgasm and then subsided to a quiet afterglow), waves breaking on a beach — you name it, but don’t confuse those same-shapes with stories. In truth such isomorphy can be seductive; many an apprentice-piece hopefully substitutes the sonority of closure, for example, for real denouement; the thing sounds finished, but something tells us — a kind of critical bookkeeping developed maybe no more than half-consciously from our lifetime experience of stories — that its dramaturgical bills haven’t been paid. Similarly, mere busyness in a story’s Middle does not necessarily advance the plot; an analogy may be drawn here to the distinction in classical physics between Effort and Work. Dramatic action, as afore-established, need not be “dramatic,” although a little excitement never hurt a story; it does need to turn the screws on the Ground Situation, complicate the conflict, move us up the ramp. Otherwise it’s effort, not work; isomorphic to storyhood, perhaps, but not the real thing.
So how do we tell. .?
By never again reading your own stories or anybody else’s — or watching any stage or screen or television-play—innocently, but always with a third eye monitoring how the author does it: what dramaturgical cards are being played and subsequently picked up (or forgotten); what waypoints (and how many, and in what sequence) the author has chosen to the dramaturgical destination, and why; what pistols, to use Chekhov’s famous example, are being hung on the wall in Act One in order to be fired in Act Three. By learning to appreciate the often masterful dramaturgic efficiency of an otherwise merely amusing TV sitcom, for example, while on the other hand appreciating the extravagance-almost-for-its-own-sake of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Maybe even by reciting like a mantra this definition of Plot, which I once upon a time concocted out of the jargon of Systems Analysis: the incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a complexified equilibrium.
Come again?
With pleasure. The “unstable homeostatic system” is that aforementioned Ground Situation: an overtly or latently voltaged state of affairs pre-existing the story’s present time; one that tends to regulate itself toward equilibrium but is essentially less than stable (otherwise there could be no story). The city of Thebes appears to be doing quite satisfactorily under its new king, who fortuitously routed the Sphinx and married the widowed queen (somewhat his elder) after the old king was mysteriously slain at a place where three roads meet. . et cetera. No ground situation, no story, however arresting the action to come, for it is its effect upon the ground situation that gives the story’s action meaning. On the other hand, if the system merely continues on its unstable homeostatic way, there’ll be no story either. Another child born to Oedipus and Jocasta? What else is new?