Superman and Dehumanity Part II — On Drama
Continued from Previous.
Can a Dehumanist concoct, without betraying his principles, a satisfying dramatic story? The short answer is no. The long answer requires we discover the nature of dehumanism and of drama.
What is Drama?
The muse of philosophy who broods on Mount Helicon must forgive me if I describe what is a sprawling mansion of many chambers with the briefest of blueprints. Again I warn the reader that we are speaking in the most rough-hewn generalities, and that the presences of many exceptions and qualifications (of which, dear reader, I doubt not you are as well aware as I) does not unmake nor invalidate the general result.
To be a satisfying drama, certain basic elements must be present, either in large or in small:
- A protagonist with a goal or dream or need or mission, who is facing…
- An obstacle (it can be a person, as an evil villain, or a situation, as life in an evil village) presenting a real challenge, perhaps an overwhelming challenge, blocking the protagonist’s achievement of this goal. Facing this challenge initiates…
- Rising action, perhaps with unexpected yet logical plot-turns to astonish the reader’s expectations, leading to…
- A climax, a crescendo or catharsis, which in turn brings about…
- A resolution that not only…
- Makes intellectual sense, with no plot threads forgotten and no plot holes showing but also…
- Makes moral and emotional sense, it shows the cosmos the way it is or the way it should be, but also…
- Makes thematic sense, such that it can be used as an example, or a model, or a reflection of life or some aspect of life.
Other aspects of storytelling (such as ornamental language or proper pacing, or the use of humor, pathos, satire, insight into human nature, or character development) are needed at least in some degree, but this varies so greatly from genre to genre and tale to tale that it cannot be simplified to a general rule.
There are five dimensions to any story: plot, characters, setting, style, and theme. Philosopher and theologian Peter Kreeft, writing about the philosophy in Tolkein’s LORD OF THE RINGS, re-words these five as dimensions into work, workers, world, words, and wisdom.
The plot is the work to be done, and a dramatic story gains stature if the work is hard, the cost is high, and the reward immense. This is why Robert Heinlein listed only three basic types of stories 1. Boy-meets-girl 2. The Little Tailor 3. The Man Who Learns Better.
What is at stake in a boy-meets-girl story is the future happiness of the couple; nothing is more immense than love. Stories involving any deep emotional relationship fall into this category, not exclusively romance. Stories of this type are about people and passions, honor and attachment: the boy is changed because he falls in love.
The Little Tailor (if I may remind any reader who don’t read fairy stories) tells of a man whose boast of swatting flies gives him a reputation as a giant killer. Then a real giant shows up. Stories of this type are about people and challenges. Facing the giant changes the tailor. What is at stake here is life and death.
Man Learns Better is an inverse of the second plot. The Man finds his fixed ideas or his innate character, when played out, leads to ruin, and this leaves him sadder but wiser, or humbler but wiser. He changes because he learns and grows. If learning your lesson carries a heavy price, the drama is greater. What is at stake here is the man’s soul.
If the hero fails, he loses his heart, or his life, or his soul.
From these three all basic variations of plots can spring: the chase, the quest, the competition, the sacrifice, or tales of revenge, escape, enlightenment, victory and defeat, but in order for the plot to be a plot something has to be at stake and it has to be meaningful to you and to your readers. The work must be a great work.
The end point of the plot is comedy or tragic or melodramatic. Comedies end happily: everyone gets married, or everyone gets a medal, or Dorothy gets back home, and, Oh, Auntie Em, there is no place like home. Tragedies end soberly: Rhett leaves without giving a damn, or Hamlet and half the cast dies, or Oedipus learns a truth so horrid that he puts out his eyes. Melodramas end, or don’t end, with more of a bittersweet sense that life simply goes on, as when Kwi Chang Kane walks off into the sunset accompanied only by the lonely warbling of a bamboo flute, or the Lone Ranger gallops away, leaving grateful and astonished townsfolk wonder who that masked man was.
Those who do the work of the story are the characters. The characters are more dramatic the more the reader can identify with them: this is sometimes achieved by making the characters well-rounded, with strengths and flaws that flow naturally from their personality, sometime by making them quirky and irregular as men in real life tend to be, with unexpected angles to their personalities, and sometimes by making them simplistic, larger-than-life, and iconic.
Usually a character who is less three dimensional seems less real and therefore engenders less reader sympathy, hence interest, hence drama. An exception arises for iconic characters who have taken up a permanent place in the imagination of the public, and I speak of Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein’s Monster, Zorro, Fu Manchu and the like. In almost every case, the original incarnation in print of the character was more quirky and particular than the many later incarnations, and that the simplification process leaves out details the original author put in, such as the character’s British title, cocaine habit, habits of speech, or added details, such as a characteristic drooping moustache or deerstalker cap or neckbolts not found in the original.
The drama of a character is in his humanity, for unless he is someone you know and love, his triumphs, passion, or losses neither elate nor sting. The complexity or simplicity of the character is merely tool for creating the empathy, the meaningfulness, that allows the reader to fall in love or fascination with the protagonist. This is not to say the protagonist need be loveable: he can have ugly personality traits. But if the author has worked the witchcraft of his craft correctly, the character will be beloved to the reader nonetheless, warts and all. The character flaws are not overlooked: but to love is to forgive.
The setting must have the same verisimilitude as the characters, or the reader will not accept the world, and the spell called suspension of disbelief will break. To that degree, imaginary lands must resemble lands that are or that could be or that should be here in the real cosmos: because stories that leave out a basic part of the cosmic all readers instinctively put less faith in, and get less drama out.
No doubt fans of science fiction and fantasy will object that the worlds in which speculative romances are set either do not yet exist or cannot ever, since they are set in other worlds or beneath the light of far suns, or set in Elfland, that perilous realm, where no laws of nature that we know hold sway. Ah, but I tell you Elfland, or something like it, is real, and that in our hearts we know of it, and it is this heart, and not your head that tells you this dull world is all the world that there is, which leaps in glad recognition at a book of speculative fiction.
Or are you an exile in this world? Nearly every science fiction reader and fantasy reader feels this sensation, and knows deep in his bones that this false and mortal world is not his home. We are in exile here. The science fiction reader in his imagination knows that he is meant for some finer world, perhaps on Mars, perhaps farther than Archenar or Andromeda, perhaps further than the Twenty-Fifth Century. In his imagination, he lives there, not here. This is a shadow or a reflection not of a neurosis but of a deep truth: The Christian in his soul knows that all the sons of Adam are meant for a finer world, a new earth under a new heaven, and in his soul he lives there, not here.
The style must be suited to the subject matter, and cohere with the rest of the tale. An epic, for example, is best served by elevated language; a children’s tale by lucid, even Biblical, simplicity of speech; Laconic heroes are better set in Westerns than in Love Stories. Humorous stories must be droll; Science Fiction requires unexpected oddities of word-use, so that readers are startled with a door dilates, or when a ship lifts rather than sets sail.
The theme is the philosophy behind the tale. It can be something as simple as the moral in an Aesop fable, or something as mechanical as allegory, but real drama is rung from the tale when the theme conveys not merely a lesson that can be put into words, but a vision of life, of man and man’s place in the cosmos, that the reader can use as a lens to view life through, and in sharper detail.
What is a dramatic theme? The Aesop fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that dramatic, or the tale of Chicken Little. They are too simple and didactic. These are merely types, or stereotypes. When you meet an alarmist, or someone who rings a false alarm, you say, “Chicken Little is like him” meaning one small aspect of that complex person is reflected in the simple theme of Chicken Little
But Scrooge is a real person. When you meet in real life a stingy and lonely grasper, solitary as an oyster, you do not say “Scrooge is like that man” but rather you say, “That man is like Scrooge” because old Ebenezer Scrooge is the more lively and realistic person of the two, even if he happens to suffer the disadvantage of being not real or never having lived.
The philosophy of life reflected in Dickens’ A CHRISTMAS CAROL is so powerful and so popular that it is almost unparalleled. If I merely told you that generosity and Christmas cheer would save even a stingy and lost old soul from the self-wrought chains of greed and avarice, and save the poor and give them hope, you might nod politely if your reason grants assent to the proposition. But if you read the tale, so that it enters your imagination bypassing the watchful guardians of your reason, in your imagination the world comes alive, scarlet and gold with passions and visions, gray with ghosts and white with snow, and the torch of the giant drops a spark of Christmas spirit in your heart, if you have one to ignite, and the sight of a crutch carefully preserved by an empty stool next to a cold fire chills your heart with tears, if you have them to shed.
Scrooge is an excellent example of the third of Hienlein’s three types of plots, the Man Who Learns Better: except that he is wiser and filled to overflow with joy when he learns better, and the dawn banishes the cloaked horror of the final spirit, and the vision of death. Tales of salvation and redemption and forgiveness and reformation are among the most powerful and dramatic stories man can tell.
Pause now and notice what all these elements must achieve if the tale is not merely to be told but well told: not merely diverting, but actually dramatically satisfying.
The plot must be both logical, springing from previous events, and engaging, springing from the choices and deliberations of the protagonist, or, better yet, the hard choices and difficult deliberations. A story cannot be told in a world without free will, because then the characters choices mean nothing.
The characters must either be iconic, that is, posses the grandeur of archetypal myth, or must be realistic, that is, possess the detailed granular reality of real persons, naturally to their own character, but with the irregularities and unexpected textures of life. The character must be empathetic, someone the reader can like, so that the character’s victories elate or woes trouble the reader. The character must be meaningful for his adventures and changes to be dramatic.
The setting must be as the characters, and reflect, remind, or contrast with the real cosmos. Tales that leave out an entire dimension of real life, such as Boy’s adventure stories with no romantic interest, cannot help but be less able to enchant the reader with the illusion of reality. They cannot help but be flat.
By the real cosmos, I do not mean the modern, scientific, naturalistic account of the cosmos. We all know or suspect that this is not the whole of the story of reality, because if material and natural reality were the whole of reality, we who lived in the cosmos would not tell stories, which are unreal, at all. The setting must be meaningful for the tale to be dramatic.
The style must augment the other dimensions of the tale: as in brief and manly speech for Westerns, elevated language for epics, drollery for comedy, and so on. The words must achieve poetry, even if it is only the angular and laconic poetry of the journalistic style best fit to tell a crime story. The words must exceed the mere denotation of words in order for the work not to be a legal document or a journalistic account, but actually to come to life in the reader’s imagination. The words have to be magic.
To be dramatic, the theme either must confirm the world view of the reader, or challenge that world view and lead the reader to a finer and better one instead: finer and better means, if anything, more meaningful, a tale that lends more depth, reality, and meaning to real life rather than vampiring meaning away. Such themes as speak to eternal truths both challenge the wrong and confirm the right in the reader, and it is in the very deepest part of his soul that the deepest themes reach. A theme is a dramatization of a philosophy; and in order for a philosophy to be good, it must most of all be truth.
Let us now descend from these high matters that the Muses on their holy mountain sing, and follow a more Orphic path, and look at where modern footsteps with such good intentions have led.
What is Dehumanism? This question will be addressed in a next installment.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
