Aristotle’s Poetics
A couple of months ago, I riffed on a Locus interviewee’s comments about writing, and this month, well, I’m going back to the well but this time it’s john Crowley and, well, it’s john Crowley…
In the January 2010 issue of Locus, John Crowley talked about writing and how he teaches, and said the following:
“When I teach science fiction classes, one of the stories I always give my students to read is “The Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw. It’s a story about memory: things that have been captured and lost, and the power of things that have been caught but shouldn’t have been. What I try to describe to students is the way a science fiction story ought to work. To be a real science fiction story but a moving one, whatever technological gimmick you come up with has to be the bearer of the meaning of the story. It has to carry the weight of the emotions. It’s not a science fiction story if the scientific wonder or futuristic thing is just there but the emotions are about me and my wife, or my feelings about my son, and by the way, we’re in the future. The SF thing has to carry the meaning, and you get the meaning of the story by thinking about the gimmick.”
Of course I’m old enough to remember that story from when it first came out, back in the day when short stories carried a bit more impact than they do now and when it was possible to read just about everything that was important in various genres without secluding one’s self in a priory.
The quote is an obvious, and valuable, lesson for science fiction writers, of course.
But, of course, it relates to any literary work powered by a central image, idea, crime, passion, adventure, monster, what have you – the gimmick, whether it is technological, fantastic, emotional, or simply the machinations of a thriller plot, serves as a metaphor for the meaning of the story. The tools of the genre serve as a vessel for the emotions of the characters in that story, the ones the reader is being asked to identify with, invest in, relate to and follow along on a journey.
Yes, I understand, Crowley is talking about a very specific thing relating to science fiction, and I’m adding fuzz to the matter at hand, generalizing and obfuscating a very important truth.
Yes, I understand that the technological innovation is not at all the same thing as a paranoid thriller plot, or a noirish scenario of doom, or a dragon, or a stranger in town, or a couple trapped in a domestic hell.
But Crowley’s observation sent my mind down a rabbit hole and into a world I haven’t inhabited in many, many years: college. Sophomore. Greek classical literature, the roots of Western literature.
And the old Red Queen said hi: Aristotle’s Poetics.
You just can’t get away from the damn thing. There’s a version for film writing, Rick Hautula (aka A.J. Matthews, or the “next Stephen King” as he’s “lovingly” referred to at Necon writers’ conference) is always referencing it whenever he talks about writing, My college professor in Greek lit obsessed about the Poetics, before he was summarily dethroned as temporary department head and saner (in only the most liberal, academic sense of the word) heads prevailed. It’s online (google it and you’ll find various “”Butcher” versions or splurge and for a couple of dollars you can pick up a better used translation), and there is a lot of study and summary material dedicated to it which presents in capsule form those hours of debating and interpretation you might spend, along with a ton of money, experiencing first hand in college classes. If you need the live performance, knock yourself out.
It’s all about dramatic unity. The Poetics offers the first cohesive theory about the structure and aesthetics of storytelling, at least as it relates to Western aesthetics. You could do worse than read, or more accurately, spend a little time studying and researching, old Aristotle. Much of what you’ll learn in modern writing courses comes from the groove he laid down 2300 years ago.
What was said then is, of course, still relevant now. Certainly in the commercial markets available to us. Certainly in relating to what our audience has been trained to expect, through school and lifetimes worth of mass consumption of stories – from structured and packaged biographies (for those non-fiction types who don’t read “fiction”) to folks schooled in everything from the classics to pulp, comics and summer blockbuster movies.
Dramatic unity calls for a story structure in which all the parts are tightly interconnected. The usual line-up includes time, place, rhythm, emotion, theme, action.
Ooooo, action. Don’t get my old professor started on that.
Anyway, Aristotle served as midwife to the notion of show, don’t tell. He viewed storytelling (specifically, tragedy) as a mimetic art, that is, a reflection of the way the world actually works. No deus ex machina. Fear and pity, at least in tragedy, are the emotional goals for the audience, followed by catharsis. Characters, sadly, are rather strictly defined in moral/societal terms, hardly the intense, psychological creatures of today.
There are interesting things out there on the Poetics – you could much worse than spend a couple of hours going through some of the online free college study material (google something like aristotle’s poetics analysis).
Yes, there are issues. This is all fine and well for Western style storytelling, and we all know that Western style storytelling is the very best of its kind, certainly, and everybody else wants our Westerns style storytelling and there really is only one kind of story and one kind structure that really, really, really reaches down into the core of who and what we are because we’re all the same, when you come right down to it, and those Greeks got it right for everybody when they did their thing and everybody else got it wrong and they just better hurry up and get with the program…
Well, there are some cultural differences, things found acceptable and rules broken, as story fulfills different needs at other times and/or parts of the world. Hell, there’s plenty of variation within our own “sacred” Western rational point of view. You can start with Euripedes.
Of course, the way story, or the art of poetry, can reflect individuality in the context of a society rather than merely represent culture, fate, what have you, is a twist on Aristotle’s take on the matter.
What makes the Poetics valuable, no matter how you shake your rhubarb (as another generation’s Joker might say), is the logic of making the story coherent in terms of an internal set of rules. If in your world folks express themselves periodically through outbreaks of song and dance, or extended hand-to-hand combat, then so be it. Just make sure the logic holds true as certainly as apples fall from trees in our world.
The Poetics might not work for you. The work might bore the bejesus out of your imagination. I’m just saying, Aristotle’s Poetics is a place a lot of writers you read and love have passed through. For some, it’s a bible. For others, a tool to help get a handle on story structure.
There’s a reason the thing’s been around for thousands of years….
