Final Fridays (12 page)

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.

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.

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.

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?

“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.

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.

 

 

M
Y 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.