May 25, 2014 Leave a Comment

Time and the Theater

“The mystery in drama is time.” –David Mamet

A plot is an arrangement of action and episode held together by the causal glue that Aristotle calls “probability and necessity.” Once it is decided that only a nuclear warhead will serve to destroy Godzilla and the other creatures he is fighting with, then whatever is required to fire such a warhead at the monsters “necessarily” follows. It doesn’t follow by strict necessity. After all, these are actions of human beings, which can always take a willful diversion. But given the end desired, the actions taken to obtain it follow by a kind of “necessity” that Aristotle tries to capture with the made-up phrase, “probability and necessity.”

A plot pictures movement through time, but in doing so it paradoxically seeks to wrest the characters out of time. In the final essay in his book, Theatre, David Mamet writes that “the rejection of this intolerable burden [i.., time], our human specialty, is the goal of the religious mystic, the yogi, the lover, and the drug addict–to live in a world without time, to achieve unbeing.”

To seek a world beyond time is also the goal of the dramatist. Aristotle famously says that tragedy is more philosophical than history because it seeks the universal in the particular. In the preface to 3 Plays Thornton Wilder echoes Aristotle when he contends that the theater’s special ability is to tell the truth both of the particular individual and of the general truth:

“It is through the theater’s power to raise the exhibited individual action into the realm of idea and type and universal that it is able to evoke our belief.”

Accordingly, Wilder disdains the tendency of 19th-century theater to “load the stage with specific objects,” objects meant to ground the action in the particularities of time and place. “So it was by a jugglery with time that the middle classes devitalized the theater. When you emphasize place in the theater, you drag down and limit and harness time to it. You thrust the action back into past time, whereas it is precisely the glory of the stage that it is always “now” there. Under such production methods the characters are all dead before the action starts. You don’t have to pay deeply from your heart’s participation.”

So a piece of drama meant for the stage shows us human beings in action, and thus movement through time, but at the same time it aspires to place that action against the backdrop of that which exists outside of time. The past and future of action is illuminated by the always “now.” For this reason the theater audience is better able to contemplate the eternal truth in the particular.

Mamet concludes his essay by saying, “The examination of this urge [to transcend time] and its avowal and the confession of its tragic impossibility is the subject of all drama.”

Tragic action, surely enough, reveals all that is humble and time-bound in the human condition. But Mamet is incorrect to say that such action is the subject of all drama. For the human mind also has its comic mode, which seeks that which transcends time–and finds it.

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May 16, 2014 Leave a Comment

The Books on Writing I’ve Learned From Most

Aristotle, Poetics

The first principles of storytelling briefly and sometimes cryptically stated.

 

Linda Seger, Making a Good Script Great

I discovered this book some years ago now in a public library in Houston, Texas. Broke open for me the whole idea of story structure: inciting incidents, turning points, etc. Not just for screenwriters.

 

Robert McKee, Story

It’s big. It’s theoretical. It repays attention a hundred-fold. Read Seger first then let McKee take you even deeper into what makes a story work. If I could keep only one writing book on my shelf, it would be this one. Not just for screenwriters.

 

Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

A book about what the title says. Invaluable advice on how to focus the mind for writing fiction.

 

Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

Wit and wisdom from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

 

Viki King, How to Write a Movie in 21 Days

Think the title sounds cheesy? I followed the program and produced a script, my very first, which got me a reputable agent in LA. A great resource for the overly-analytical.

 

John Vorhaus, The Comic Toolbox

Broke open for me the principles of comedy. If we can’t have Aristotle’s lost book on comedy, at least we have Vorhaus.

 

Stephen King, On Writing

I’ve never read a Stephen King novel but I’m greatly in his debt for this book.

 

David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla

In this book Mamet reveals the Long Lost Secret of the Incas. Learn it. Memorize it.

 

I have on my shelf Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, a book Graham Greene mentions in his autobiography. I’ve never looked at it but I aim to now.

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May 15, 2014 1 Comment

Unity of Place and the Family Household

The pursuit of unity of place brings us back ultimately to the home.

Aristotle says in the Poetics that the best tragedies have to do with only a few great houses: those of Atreus, Oedipus, and the like. And Chesterton contends that the best storytelling spirals closer and closer inward to the family and the home. Why? Because the family household is where the human person is most of all a king. Perhaps not a literal king like Agamemnon or Oedipus, but a king, at least, within the confines of the small patch of this earth’s land over which he rules in freedom.

The family household, writes Chesterton, “is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter. It is not so much the place where a man kills his wife as the place where he can take the equally sensational step of not killing his wife.”

Other institutions, Chesterton continues, are largely made for us by strangers. But the family “is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”

Pemberley. Bleak House. Tara. Brideshead. Downton Abbey.

The family household is the prime locus where we use our freedom to make or break our happiness, and thus it is the place where our dramas necessarily tend and concentrate.

 

* The image above is of Castle Howard, Yorkshire, where the BBC Television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was filmed. Reprinted courtesy of diverstonefly at Wikimedia Commons.

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May 14, 2014 Leave a Comment

The Dramatic Unities

In his Poetics Aristotle sets down rough principles in regard to unity of action and time. He remarks that the plot of tragedy concerns, in a real sense, a single action, and that it “tries especially to be bound by one circuit of the sun or to vary little from this.” He doesn’t explicitly mention any stricture in regard to unity of place, though the stricture on time might be taken to imply one. In the neoclassical movement of the 16th and 17th centuries, in the drama of Molière and Racine, Aristotle’s rough principles of dramatic unity calcified into hard-and-fast rules. But even taking Aristotle’s remarks about dramatic unity of place and time as principles, not rules, is there any reason for the dramatist to be bound by them?

I worried especially about the unity of place as I composed my play, The Actor, which depicts the life of the young Karol Wojtyła from the years 1939 to 1942. There is a certain unity of place in the play in that all the scenes take place in Nazi-occupied Kraków, but the scenes themselves move from the university to the Wojtyła apartment to a quarry to a cemetery, etc. At very least I had made the jobs of a future director and set designer more challenging. But I took consolation from Tom Stoppard’s approach in the text of The Coast of Utopia, which effortlessly moves through the months and years and from setting to setting as though it were a screenplay.

In an essay included in his 1923 volumes, Fancies versus Fads, G.K. Chesterton offered an intriguing defense of the principles of dramatic unity. “Wherever [dramatic unity] can be satisfied, something not superficial but rather subconscious is satisfied. Something revisits us that is the strange soul of single places; the shadow of haunting gods or of household gods.”

A single setting and a single action bound more or less “by one circuit of the sun.” Artists have always recognized the freedom that is unleashed by placing limits upon their creativity; the principles of dramatic unity are the “frame” around the action of a plot. The effect of such limitation is, as Chesterton observes, uncanny: something strange and haunting is set free when the action of a play or other story is thus constrained.

“We might say,” concludes Chesterton, “that superior literature is centripetal, while inferior literature is centrifugal.”

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March 24, 2014 Leave a Comment

Mystery Writing and Paradox

Last time I characterized mystery or crime writing as involving paradox. What does this mean?

In mystery stories, the moment of illumination takes the form of a paradox comprised of verbal and pictorial images. Two apparently contradictory elements, [a] the side of the character that cannot be connected with the crime; and [b] the crime itself, are “harmonized” in the detective’s solution.

Consider one of the best and most famous instances of paradox in mystery writing, the solution to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, “Silver Blaze.” (If you want the spoiler, click here.)

Or think of the climax to Christopher Nolan’s film, The Dark Knight. Batman realizes that in order to achieve his aim of protecting Gotham City he, paradoxically, has to be perceived as a villain.

“What good and bad paradoxes possess in common is the shock derived from contradiction: paradox is [apparent] contradiction, explicit or implied” (Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, p. 15). Paradox is a strong version of Aristotle’s notion from the Poetics that the climax of a story should be a “marvelous inevitability.” In his book Heretics Chesterton defines paradox simply as mystery (Kenner, p. 14).

A paradox is no mere verbal pirouette; paradox is based upon the reality of things, and arises naturally when “the simplest truths” are put in “the simplest language” (Kenner, p. 15).

But there are two ways of understanding how paradox works in mystery stories. Not an either/or, more of a continuum. One, call it the “Sherlock Holmes approach,” is to see the paradox as a riddle or challenge resolvable by the “scientific” discovery of linkages of material causes. In this case, the paradox is merely mechanical.

But another way to understand the paradox of the detective-story or thriller, call it “the Father Brown approach,” is to see it as resolvable by the discovery of not only material causes, but also what we might call moral causes, in particular the paradox of Original Sin. In Chesterton’s story, “The Secret of Father Brown,” Father Brown confesses that he is a murderer–in the sense that his deep priestly knowledge of the workings of human frailty, most of all his own, allows him to detect causes at work that escape other inquirers.

As I mentioned in my last post, in The Gadfly series I am taking the Father Brown approach.

What are your favorite mystery/crime stories or films, and how do you see paradox functioning within them?

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June 3, 2013 Leave a Comment

Marvelous Inevitability

Aristotle in his Poetics tells the story of King Mitys of Argos who was murdered. Later on, a statue of Mitys was erected in the town, and one day the murderer himself came by to look at it. But while the murderer was looking at the statue, it happened to fall down upon him and kill him.

Pure chance? Cosmic justice?

Aristotle’s concern in the Poetics is not so much to answer these larger questions. His concern is with storytelling, and what makes for a successful climax to a story.

That success comes down, Aristotle says, to two factors, factors that are relevant not only to the blackly comic story of Mitys and his murderer, but to all stories.

First, the climax of a compelling story must be, to some significant degree, contrary to expectation. We don’t expect Mitys’s murderer to die in the end. We don’t expect Mr. Darcy to continue his pursuit of Elizabeth Bennet after Lydia’s elopement and Lady Catherine’s visit. We don’t expect Sam Gamgee to emerge as the hero at the end of Lord of the Rings. And so these story climaxes make us marvel.

But secondly, what happens contrary to expectation in a story climax must also give the impression of having come about with a certain inevitability. For “even among chance things,” says Aristotle, “those seem most wondrous which appear to have come to be as if for a purpose.”

Thus the death of Mitys’s murderer is the more wondrous because it seems to have been “planned.” Thus the union of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth and Sam’s heroics on Mount Doom are all the more wonderful because they are the result of deeper causes at work well below the surface of these stories (in a word, Darcy and Sam’s virtue).

For us to marvel at a story climax, it cannot come about so contrary to expectation that it seems contrived. There must be a “logic” to the unexpected, so that when it comes about we say to ourselves, “Aha! I see now. That’s the way things had to be.”

We love surprises. But we also love to discern causes.

Best of all, we love to have the experiences combined.

Marvelous inevitability. It’s one of the chief secrets of great storytelling in any genre.

How will you incorporate it into the story you’re working on today?

 

*The photograph above is of the Head of Hermes from the Ancient Agora Museum in Athens, taken by Marsyas and found on Wikimedia Commons.

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