A Story is A Relationship.

 In my limited understanding, we have several possible forms or criteria that a story can take, even if some theorists, writers, and academics have only one. For example, if you've taken a screenwriting course, a "story" must, absolutely must, have conflict to maintain narrative drive. A muddled mess that goes nowhere and bores the audience is the effect of passionless exchange. In a short story class you might hear instructors insist that a story have characters that change. In a literature class stories must have a revealing theme asking questions that haven't been asked before, even about phenomena (like death, for instance)  examined in literature since the "ur" story. And of course, there's the standard criteria that we learn about in kindergarten: a story must have a beginning, middle, and end.

    As excellent as these rules of thumb may be, I'm not sure if any (except, perhaps, the last criteria) have an absolutely solid foundation. Perhaps if we're merely talking about art, we don't expect absolutes as we might in science. But we're talking about a phenomenon that extends in different directions, that is the material of art perhaps, but could indeed follow something more coherent with consciousness and events. True, conflict creates tension which moves drama forward, but if you look at, say, a Coen Brothers' film, like "Fargo" there are plenty of scenes that don't have much conflict and, truthfully, don't move the story forward (at least not in a singular, exotelic direction). I also insist that a story is a form (a genre) of narrative. No one would argue against this, but I also insist on the essential narrative form as a "chronicle of change." That the bare and atomic elements of narrative are time, space, event, entity, observer/reporter, medium, etc.

         It’s up to us: the destroyers of worlds. As writers, we are the masters of what is under our pen point. But are we? Perhaps the over-controlled, heavy-handed story isn’t really a story at all, just as a blueprint isn’t really a building. To invite chaos, inspiration, confusion, your view of your God, or whatever way that you accept that you’re not always in control of things, even those domains that seem ultimately and absolutely under your control, is to live as an artist.

When we constrain narrative into story, harness and tame it, these elements mirror the habits of molecules. Particles coalesce into more complex materials fashioned to key, or dovetail into the mechanism of a story. There are narratives that aren't story. A list, a litany, for instance, or a ship's log, or a report, an account, an anecdote, a flow-chart, a graph, an algorithm, etcetera, are not stories in the true narratological sense of the word (though they may be in the vernacular sense). Narrative elements constrained are what we're most comfortable talking about character, plot, setting, point of view, theme, voice and style, etc. 

       Think of variations of what a story should have, or how her elemental form might take shape, and that different aspects of the raw narrative elements may be emphasized over others, or more critical to the various definitions that we're speaking of. For example, one might insist that a story has conflict, but I would say that conflict itself isn't the necessary feature, but that conflict, as well as other conceivable patterns of power, is the consequence of relationships between entities. 

    Simply, "a story is about relationships," would suffice here. Whether there's conflict, or not only changes the scale of forward movement within a story's form. Conflict is only one of the many ways two entities (characters) can interact. They can be drawn to each other, or apart or even orbit each other. But without relationships, we have nothing. To get crafty here, one might envision the atomic structure of a hydrogen atom (bear with me here), where one electron orbits one neutron. The energy between the two keeps them in balance, forever in cohort with each other. Without at least those two particles, we don't have matter at all. 

    There can, of course, be more than two entities in a story, and they don't, in this theory, have to be characters at all, really. But characters, as we define them, are complex and reflect our experiences (of course), and stories are usually about the human experience in some way. Even when we think of animation, or magical stories with animal characters, these entities are essentially human characters in drag. Without those very human qualities of wants, desires, and needs, they forfeit their right to occupy the story as characters at all. 

    A story about, say, water, as an entity provides some challenges. Water, much like a character, can change under various pressures and external circumstances. It behaves in a way consistent with its material form, it flows, it drips, it even erodes and provides life. But while it has tendencies, these aren't reliant on any psychology, but on simply their relative relationship to the other material elements and external changes that coerce them. But in my simplified definition, you can imagine that a story can exist as an entity interacting with something else, ergo a relationship between it and some other material thing.

    This is just a way to think about stories. When we don't have conflict it's often a simple problem, though it might be a deal-breaker in terms of a story's set up. Imagine you're writing a story about a character who is all alone. Here, there's no relationship between the character and anything, or anyone else. You might argue that the character's inner world may be subject to a continuing narrative, and assert that the inner world is an excellent domain for exploration by the writer, that literature is the medium that can bring to life our internal worlds, much more acutely than, say, filmmaking or theater. I would agree with that: but I would also insist that once we get inside the domain of a character's psyche, we have to treat it, the brain, mind, or soul, as we would any other material landscape, occupied with features that complicate it, and certainly an menagerie of characters, who inevitably will find themselves in relationships with one another to spar, fall in love, or compete in some way. The devil and angels sitting on our shoulders provide a nice simplified idea of what our internal worlds provide for their inhabitants. So even in a story that takes place in the interior of a single individual, there still must be relationships and possible conflict between the various lobes, souls, spirits, dybbuks, cherubim, G-d, gods, goddesses, demons, ids, egos and super-egos! 

    And as to a story only achieving its form when a character goes through some fundamental change, we've met a lot of characters who don't necessarily turn into something entirely different in a fundamental way. "Hills Like White Elephants," may not have that overt kind of metamorphosis that this idea suggests, nor might "Cathedral" necessarily. Though often the rookie writer may not see the delicate alterations in the fabric of a character's interior world that might affirm this axiom, and it should be through the practice of reading, the art of reading, that we begin to see distinct differences in a character's outlook, mood, or understanding. But sometimes stories really don't work at all on the possibility of a character changing, and it might be that the "entity" that changes isn't in the story at all, but in the parallel experience the reader goes through in which, perhaps, they change! What the story might do in terms of technique is reveal something discreet that we were unaware of at the onset, something that alarms or disturbs or awakens us. Hence, another perhaps necessary feature that a story can take is that it must reveal, like an onion, various levels of truth about our experience as human beings. 

We are the storytelling animal. 

Jim Sidel

A Story is (a) Grammar; Narrative is Language. 

The infant's laugh is sound, her mother's cry as it leaves her room an utterance. "I" the instant the synapses connect to see the self, "U" as the front of the brain reaches to the back and we see the other.

The consonant gives shape to the vowel, form in the void of waves and particles. Shape and then figure, entity to character. 

A story is a sentence,  a relation to things in time connected by action or agreement or repulsion. A verb. 

The analogy is the attainment of a thing not yet imagined, though taped from the surry of experience. The metaphor offering that magic "click" the acid spark that lights up the eyes. 

As we proceed, there are things to remember. A story is a narrative, but a narrative is not a story. A narrative is

A chronicle of change...

Chronicle being the operative word, its prefix from the Greek, Kronos--Time. Events over time (as if there's anything else. The index of a witness that entails jugement for what is narraitable. The analogy here is safe:

A song is to music what a story is to narrative.

Hence, story is a mere genre of narrative. Narrative is the raw material, elemental and formless phenomena in a certain wavelength.

Time

Space

Entity

Event

Witness

One might ask about the tree falling in the woods. Only constraints of a particular style diminish these red hot formless objects into a story. Constraints are freedom. This isn't Orwellian Newspeak, but the same limitations that make light (darkness) and fashion our own character out of flesh. 

A story has its own definitive elements, mostly familiar to the novice.

Plot > event+time

Character> entity

Setting> space

Narrator> witness

We can also add additional material that furthers the nature of the type of narrative unfolding.

Point of View

Voice and Tone

Tension

And then further things by getting into a finer grain.

Narrative Time (scene, summary, etc.)

Tension

Narrative Drive

We can dial in further, if you'd like, but for the time being let's contemplate these materials and what they give us, but also why.

In all things, gray. The pallet nuanced. Indefinite supplants the definite. Melville's river boat passengers in The Confidence Man are shadows, not material, described by the volumes filled. Anti-literature, anti-story, anti-matter. How does the writer retreat from the habit of rendering, in the material of abstraction, the concrete? How does he not fall prey for absoluteness, for accuracy, for truth? To break this taboo, the secular and constant affirmation of "best practices: beginning with details that are concrete, fixed, relevant and absolute presents a catastrophic erasure of the discipline itself. Where does one find the solid if not in the abstract liquid domain of language?

"'I pretend not to divine your meaning there,' said the herb-doctor, after a pause, during which he eyed the Missourian with a kind of pinched expression, mixed of pain and curiosity, as if he grieved at his state of mind and at the same time, wondered what had brought him to it; 'but this much I know,' he added, 'that the general cost of your thoughts is, to say the least, unfortunate.'"

Song is to music what a story is to narrative. Music is an assortment of elements relating to sound: rhythm, tempo, dynamics, harmony, tone, texture, time, and a song is a particular arrangement of these elements according to constraints. A pop song is different from a dance mix, a piece of jazz is different from a symphony. These genres differ in how these elements are constrained; that is, how they are held back, reinforced, shaped, formed, etc. All forms of creative work exist as a combination of elements constrained according to fashion, style, or genre.
    The same is true with narrative and story.  While music is sound configured to, and arranged by constraints. Those configurations might have aesthetic or sensual values, or they might be meaningful in some other way. Narrative, for our sake, we’ll refer to in this class as “A chronicle of Change.” This is my definition and it suits the cross pollinating reality of teaching students engaged in multiple variations of creative work. Note that word “chronicle” begins with the root, “chronos” which refers to sequential time. A chronicle is an index of events over time.
    Narrative (like music) is merely a set of possibilities.  The raw material of event, space, time, entity, and observer: a chronological index of events. More precisely these elements concede to plot, setting, time, character, point of view, voice, tone, style, etc.  A story is a genre of narrative. In this class, we’re focusing on a literary form known as the short story, which is short, but, as all great art attests, much bigger than the sum of its parts.

Story and Narrative

   “I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

Indeed, readers, writers, filmmakers, game designers, illustrators and other practitioners of art and design that rely on narrative design and story, (even those we don’t readily consider dependent on narrative, like musicians, fashion designer or architects) take for granted their limited understanding of story as something with a beginning, middle and end, as being all there is to know about this plastic form, this universal means of organizing and transmitting experience. 

In understanding a story it’s imperative that we define and distinguish story from things it might resemble. The difference, for example, between “Story” and “Narrative” is often misunderstood.

Tony Buba at The Pacific Film Archive

Braddock Revisited

(2014) This week, the Pacific Film Archive hosts filmmaker Tony Buba. I mention Buba and his work in my April, 2012 post in Where The Weather Suites My Clothes.  Buba was one of my first film teachers back in the 1980's when I was a teenager eager to get my hands on the "big guns," a clunky Frezzolini news camera, and an ARRI BL that claimed pedigree somewhere at the front lines of "National Geographic" production: Jakarta, maybe the Alps... A documentarian himself, Buba proved to be a hands-off instructor, endorsing a DIY, guerrilla-style of filmmaking that insisted that anything he could teach us was better learned in the field. Of course, we're talking about shooting film here ($$$), not recording on an iPhone.
  His own work hit a chord; his short, gritty black and white profiles were both humane and ripe with poetics, despite directness and transparency. Characters inhabiting these hometown streets are Buba's friends, family, and acquaintances, and yet they are as rich and sparkling with color as any method actor walking Scorsese's Mean Streets. Watching the Braddock Chronicles, mostly filmed in the mid to late seventies, is akin to listening to a lost Tom Waits album from his Rain Dogs era. At the heart of such lyrical narrative, in Buba or Waits, is the place itself..."In the neighborhood, in the neighborhood...," Waits sings. In both, context becomes character. Or, each entity refuse to distinguish itself from the other.

   In a dozen or so short films we're introduced to Braddock's inhabitants: The consummate optimist, the hopeful and tragic entrepreneur, Jay Roy, proprietor of Jay Roy's New and Used Furniture, coaching his sales staff on self-respect and the dangers of not making mistakes (a moving and tender scene, balked by his own grand dreams); Peabody, a young man who's claim to fame is a fall from a six story window as a boy, a tragedy that he can't shake, that forever characterizes and determines his fate; Buba's own grandmother, Mrs. G.; and Sweet Sal, the caustic, streetwise braggadocio who's screen-time of less than half an hour forever dooms any of Hollywood's iterations of like hustlers, to the thinnest cliche. Rich, funny, and moving portraits all.
  And though self-concious and performative, his subjects are in earnest. They are grounded, yet striving for something that will enable transcendence, economic or spiritual. These are relatable themes. In Buba's cinematic Braddock, the familiar becomes exotic. The cinematography is subtle, stylistic manipulations elegant in their subtly (choices made are motivated by content).  True to realism, the Ordinary is made Extraordinary.

   However, to reduce the work to a sort of interior travel-log of hip exotica, would be to ignore exactly what the filmmaker intends, which is (first and foremost) to hold on to people in his life, people that will eventually fade away as we all do, but also to witness to how these people fit into this larger socioeconomic system and how they respond to guaranteed failure. After the houselights came up, after a bout of good natured self-deprecation (a disposition I share: idiomatic to the region) Buba's rigorous, insightful critique followed: a scalding indictment of capitalism, measured and thorough, evidenced in stories from back then and now, regionally, nationally and internationally.

For a long time I've tried to track down a quote by, I believe, Grace Paley who said a story cannot ignore the economics under which its characters exist. My awkward paraphrase highlights the  Marxist lens through which Paley writes: Marxist in the sense that the reality all human beings share is a condition of material survival, and even in the most lyrical, obtuse and intimate entries to the Republic of Letters, its a constant an artists cannot ignore. She herself poo-pooed her writing, her art: it was insignificant in the grand scheme: she was an activist first.

In almost all fiction writing and literature classes I've taken, character trumps plot and setting. This is usually a trail head undertaken to dissuade students from aping cliches, or fetishizing novelty, but beyond the pedagogical is a deeply moral, classical humanist polemic. I too am comfortable with this ideology, but cannot ignore the relationship of context to character in quite the same way. The early practitioners of Naturalism, Zola and Huysman, configured narratives in which determinism, economic and otherwise, forecloses on character. Characters are at the mercy of systems (where God had previously held office): class, economics, nature, and, cannot possibly enjoy free will. Any exhibition of agency is an illusion. This is the lens through which Stanley Kubrick saw the world, the attitude of a distant, cold scientist looking at his subjects under a microscope. Buba started in the social sciences, and film was the tool, like many documentarians, he used to explore the limits and boundaries of free will, but he never lost sight of the human beings undergoing such a challenge. These are people he loves.

   Buba's subjects are inseparable from their setting and their concerns are usually about making a buck. To write about characters in a setting, and not have a notion of how they put food on the table, lacks verisimilitude and endangers my ability to hold the author of such work up to any standard of Ethos. An odd example to use here would be Carrie Bradshaw in Sex in The City, the newspaper columnist who collects Italian pumps, lives in a Manhattan apartment as big as a presidential suite, yet probably makes $40K. Bradshaw professes no limits or sacrifice, and enjoys voraciously expensive luxuries at every turn. Anyone I knew who watched the series, no matter how latent their politics, seemed to notice this disparity, a poetic license taken but not easily swallowed. And while their might have been many things to take offense at in such a sit-com, this odd lack of realism seemed to stand out and irritate like a hangnail. 

It's a good time to think over what's changed in the last couple of years, in Braddock and in my shallow assessment of what's going on there. The thesis of my essay from 2012 pivots on what it means to re-imagine landscape: aesthetics and phenomenology. I accomplished this using Braddock as a set piece in parallel with how advertisers and image makers create mythology, and how a viewer can re-purpose that mythology to their own, perhaps more ennobled, ends.

   But a difficulty arises here when we consider Braddock and the mythology Levi's imagined of the setting. It's a mythology distinguishing wilderness from civilization, and the heroic pioneer's adventure between. The same difficulty that poisons all colonial aspirations: We think of landscape and wilderness in contrast with civilization, visually represented as an absence of people, as if we, they, us, are (as spoilers--guilty) only good in respect to not being visible. The question of aesthetics, our understanding of landscape as a visual phenomena, adapts well to these conditions. Note that even our national parks, that paragon of what we think of as the best of American Progressive tendencies, were founded on the displacement (often violent) of native people.

Visibility is a quality worthy of deep meditation. The difference between what we mean by wasteland and wilderness, and their antecedents all presume what can be seen and not, text and subtext. What lies beneath a wasteland and who determines what waste is in the first place?

In this case, Levis with the mayor's approval, portrayed Braddock as an open space, a wilderness of sorts, in which to "homestead." The ironies here are compounded when we think of this seemingly virtuous, salt-of-the-earth idea of building a home. But Braddock wasn't an empty space, it was still full of people, just not as many as had been their fifty years ago. And, of course (as the familiar story follows), these were people of color. Braddock is mostly African American, with sprinkling of Whites here and there. And the overall population grew by about 20 people. 
   Perhaps this isn't negligible in a town of such a small population, but the "settlers" were mostly white, and now many have them have also abandoned Braddock. The people of Braddock still exits and struggle to raise families in the valley. They are visible, as photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier reminds us, and they are not ghosts, nor caricatures, dolls or manikins garnishing a landscape.

   I'm always excited to see the region I grew up in grow and bring in culture. Pittsburgh, a few miles down the road, I envision as a place where art, work, landscape, and life, can cohabitate. I lived to make this happen when I spent a portion of my life there, and as a emigre I still want it to happen. The recent media hype about restaurateur Kevin Sousa's Kickstarter campaign to open a high-end establishment, Superior Motors, in Braddock sparkled with the same magic that all of Fetterman's projects induce. Apparently, Sousa's fundraising surpassed any previous food related campaign in the history of Kickstarter. As Buba pointed out during a Q and A, most of the people who gave Sousa money were white, and white people tend to give money to other white people. The groundbreaking will be in a neighborhood where the majority of the local residents (more like, all the local residents) can't even afford the tomato salad. This seems almost a dull story, how predictable this route of gentrification becomes.

   Where will the Sousa's patrons park their hybrids, and will they be able to walk down the street with the blinders, avoiding the annoyed sneers of locals? Can one simply ignore the economic realities around them in favor of pleasure? Blindly we assume authorship, dictating what comes into our everything but our most peripheral of senses, like flimsy sit-com writing. Is there shame in eating a meal, (perhaps with ingredients locally procured, something they can rest their morals on), that the family living across the street will never be able to afford? A bit of disgust floats up at this point.

The worst thing in the world, perhaps, would be for the ambitions, the visionary quests, of people like Fetterman, Sousa, and the folks at Levis, to come to light and for a shitload of people to "homestead" Braddock by buying up and restoring turn of the century homes (if that's even possible in a town where the most notable landmark is a carcinogen huffing steel mill). Property values go up. Where will the people of Braddock go?

   And yet the tax money is leaving. USS pays a sickeningly small portion to the city. The property on which the Edgar Thompson (ET) Works are built is valued at something like 3 million. This is a mill produces something like 2.9 million net tons of steel a year, approximately twenty percent of the nation's current steel production. ET employs, however, only a few hundred people. Schools are underfunded and closing. The hospital closed. The streets are falling apart. This is a corporation folks, responsible to no one.

   Aching over Braddock (or Pittburgh, a city that kept its head above water and is now being courted by Google) isn't just provincialism: it takes little foresight to see the parallels all over the country, from Midtown Manhattan to San Francisco. The contempt for the poor and the middle class, the unceasing efforts of the rich and the powerful to dominate and push away. One doesn't have to even be a inhuman avatar of the plutocracy, or even a predatory, pinky-ringed Wall Street villain to play into these mechanisms. It might be that  John Fetterman and sensualists like Sousa, or any of the wide-eyed, have good intentions, but without bracing against capitalism measures of success, then failure is eminent. It's in the broth.

Rather than further the topic through my own lens, I offer an update by Sean Posey (who's also a photographer) in Rust Wire, "The Battle for Braddock, PA"