by John Barth
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: . 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. N
o 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?
“And then one day,” as the narrative formula puts it, the Dramatic Vehicle rolls into town: A murrain descends upon Thebes and environs and is determined to be owing to the gods’ displeasure at the unsolved murder of old King Laius. Because most stories originate in some arresting experience or event—“Wait’ll you hear what happened to me last night! ”—it’s a common failing of apprentice fiction to be more interesting in its action and characters than in its point; to launch an arresting or at least entertaining (potential) dramatic vehicle without a clearly established and thought-through ground situation, as ripe as Sophocles’s Thebes for Incremental Perturbation—
Which is to say, for the successive complications of the conflict. That crazy old prophet Tiresias reluctantly claims that Oedipus himself was old King Laius’s murderer, and then.... The conflict-complications comprising a story’s Middle may in some cases be more serial than incremental: One can imagine rearranging the order of certain of Don Quixote’s sorties against Reality or of Huck’s and Jim’s raft-stops down Old Man River without spoiling the effect. Even in those cases, however, the overall series is cumulative, the net effect incremental; the unstable homeostatic system is quantitatively perturbed and re-perturbed, until....
In the most efficiently plotted stories, these perturbations follow not only upon one another but from one another, each paving the way for the next. In what we might call a camel’s-back story, on the other hand, the complicative straws are simply added, one by one, as the story’s Middle performs its double and contradictory functions of simultaneously fetching us to the climax and strategically delaying our approach thereto. In both cases, however—as Karl Marx says of history and as one observes everywhere in nature—enough quantitative change can effect a comparatively swift qualitative change: The last straw breaks the camel’s back; one degree colder and the water freezes; at some trifling new provocation the colonies rebel. You say the ditched baby had a swollen foot, like, uh, mine? And that the uppity old dude I wasted back at that place where three roads meet was actually . . . ?
How many perturbatory increments does a story need? Just enough: Too few leads to unconvincing climax, faked orgasm; too many is beating a dead horse, or broken camel. And how many are just enough? Just enough—although one notes in passing the popularity of threes, fives, and sevens in myths and folk-stories.
The climax or turn, when it comes, happens relatively quickly: It’s “catastrophic” in the mathematicians’ Catastrophe Theory sense, whether or not (as Aristotle prescribes) it involves the fall of the mighty from the height of fortune to the depths of misery. Even in the most delicate of “epiphanic” stories, the little epiphany that epiphs, the little insight vouchsafed to the protagonist (or perhaps only to the reader), does so in a comparative flash—and for all its apparent slightness, is of magnitudinous consequence.
Which consequence we measure by the net difference it effects in the ground situation. Like some pregnancy tests, the measurement is only one-way valid: If nothing of consequence about the ground situation has been altered, no story has been told; the action has been all Effort and no Work. If the ground situation has unquestionably been changed (all the once-living characters are now dead, let’s say), then a story may have been told. The follow-up test is whether that change—be it “dramatic,” even melodramatic, or so almost imperceptible that the principals themselves don’t yet realize its gravity—is dramaturgically/thematically meaningful, in terms of what has been established to be at stake. The “equilibrium” of a story’s denouement is not that of its opening: Order may reign again in Thebes, for a while anyhow, under Kreon’s administration; but Jocasta has hanged herself, and Oedipus has stabbed out his eyes and left town. It is an equilibrium complexified: qualitatively changed even where things may appear to all hands (except the reader/spectator) to be Back to Normal.
Otherwise, what we have attended may have its incidental merits, but for better or worse (usually worse) it’s not a story.
“The Parallels!”: Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges
This record of encounters with two of my literary navigation stars was delivered to a conference on Calvino at the University of California at Davis in April 1997 and subsequently published in the inaugural issue of the journal Context in 1999. I include it here among these essays “On Reading, Writing, and the State of the Art,” but it could as fittingly appear in the later “Tributes and Memoria” section of this volume.
MY PERSONAL REMINISCENCES of the writer we here celebrate can be covered in short order, for I didn’t come to know the man nearly so well on that level as I wish I had. Italo Calvino’s fiction I discovered in 1968, the year Cosmicomics appeared in this country in William Weaver’s translation.1 I was teaching then at the State University of New York at Buffalo and had fallen much under the spell of Jorge Luis Borges, whom I had discovered just a couple of years earlier. In that condition of enchantment I had published in’68 a sort of proto-postmodernist manifesto called “The Literature of Exhaustion”2 and also my maiden collection of short stories, entitled Lost in the Funhouse and subtitled Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (that particular deployment of the term “fiction” is a salute to Borges’s ficciones). In short, the ground had been prepared for my delight in Calvino’s Cosmicomics and then in his T-Zero stories, which appeared in Mr. Weaver’s English the following year. Here, I thought, was a sort of Borges without tears, or better, a Borges con molto brio: lighter-spirited than the great Argentine, often downright funny (as Sr. Borges almost never is), yet comparably virtuosic in form and language, comparably rich in intelligence and imagination.
I was sufficiently impressed—and the university was sufficiently well funded in those Lyndon Johnson/Nelson Rockefeller years—to write soon after to Signor Calvino at his Paris address, inviting him to visit Buffalo as Señor Borges had recently done, also at my eager invitation. Indeed, I urged Calvino to be my professorial replacement for a semester or even a whole academic year. At that time I was the lucky sitter in a brand-new and peculiarly endowed professorial chair whose generous income I was not permitted to draw as additional salary, but was allowed to use to hire a visiting writer to replace me from time to time. The first of these eminent succedanea had been Donald Barthelme; I much wanted the second to be Italo Calvino. In due time I received a cordial reply—in Italian, which I gathered (and a bilingual colleague confirmed) to say that while Calvino was gratified by the invitation, he was not yet confident enough of his English to preside over a “creative writing” course at our university. Such enterprises were and are, of course, quite foreign to our European brethren. My enthusiasm for Calvino’s fiction, however, was sufficiently shared by others at that lively place in that lively time (imagine having Don Barthelme and Michel Foucault as simultaneously visiting professors, as we did in Buffalo in 1972) to inspire the drama department to mount a charming stage adaptation of Cosmicomics in honor of the author; and having made each other’s epistolary acquaintance, Calvino and I exchanged books and occasional letters thereafter. He sent me Invisible Cities and the Tarots, both of which I found wonderfully good; I sent him Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera.
A few years later, in 1976, I was able to re-extend my come-visit invitation, this time from Johns Hopkins, whereto I had moved and wherefrom we contrived to extract some special funding for distinguished visitors in connection with the university’s centennial festivities. And this time, to our interdepartmental delight, Calvino accepted. Indeed, he accepted in English, declaring that he now felt confident enough in our language to give the thing a brief try. And at the close of his letter of acceptance I was charmed by . . . Friendly yours.
In the event, he was with us
in Baltimore for about two weeks in March of that year: a dapper, courteous, reserved but entirely cordial fellow whose alert, rather intense mien reminded me of a sharp-eyed bird’s. To my apprentice fiction-writers he read his essay on fiction as an ars combinatoria within a closed field. To the university’s Italian community he lectured in Italian on Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (but he politely declined an invitation from the Italian consulate in Baltimore to attend a reception there in his honor, on the grounds that he was visiting as a writer, not as a paisano). To the university community at large he gave a public reading from Cosmicomics, T-Zero, and Invisible Cities, which my wife and I remember with particular warmth despite the strain of his fallible and often hesitant English. I had let Calvino know, earlier, that his fiction had been among my courtship materials in the wooing of my bride—especially the lovely closing story from Cosmicomics, called “The Spiral”—and in acknowledgment of his unwitting role as our Galeoto, he included that story in his program, dedicating it to us. Finally, to our literature students and faculty he gave a delightful talk in English on his adventures with the Tarot cards, illustrating his remarks with the deck itself. A student of mine from those days remembers his accidentally dropping the whole pack in mid-demonstration; I myself cannot imagine Italo Calvino ever dropping a card or missing a trick—and sure enough, when I recently reviewed the videotapes of that occasion, I was gratified to see vindicated both my memory and Calvino’s manual dexterity.