On 'Diverse Story Forms and Themes, Not Just Diverse Faces'

I've recently been doing my best to dig myself some nice big holes on issues of huge social importance, so why stop now?  I'm on a roll.  With that in mind, let me grab my shovel and turn to a recent SFWA blog posting on diversity in story structure by Henry Lien.  It's an erudite, thoughtful, well-argued piece and one that I recommend you read - preferably after you've watched Parasite (NB: there are spoilers both there and below).

But it's not one that I buy. Not wholly, at least.

The piece argues that diversity shouldn't just encompass the players but story structure too.  And what could possibly be wrong with that?  Well, nothing at all, if it were meaningful - but I'm really not sure that it is.

What it puts me in mind of more than anything is deep and surface structure of language in Chomskian transformational generative grammar, which I had to tame during my masters almost a quarter of a century ago.  If you're still with me (well done if you are), the point is simply that all languages, whether natural or manufactured, like Esperanto, have a common fundamental grammatical structure if they are to work.  They may look like different animals but, under the skin, every language has a common skeleton.  And I think the same applies to story structure if you dig deep enough.

Let's take the points in turn.  Lenses.  The lesson here is that different cultures have different tropes, which means readers or viewers arrive with different baggage.  This is one I agree with, but isn't it something of a trivial point?  Delineate on pretty much any basis you choose - national, cultural, racial, age, class, religion - and you'll find beliefs, reference points, in-jokes, even the meaning of colours, change.  That choosing a significant basis to delineate on leads to significant differences is hardly surprising. 

One point that Westwood and Simpson's 'Lore of the Land', a brilliant, epic tome which I've been slowly working my way through for the last four years or so, makes is that the significance of folkloric elements in England can (or could) change even from county to county.  So, whether eating fairy-food is a route to untold wealth and luck or a recipe for a sticky end could once depend on a few miles one way or the other.  That's no longer the case, with the homogenisation of a nation.

The continuing blandification (aka Americanisation) of planet Earth is, no doubt, evening the playing field in a myriad of ways as I type.  I'm delighted that cultures fight to retain their own character, but the direction of history suggests that a planetary monoculture is the logical end-point.  Maybe Star Trek was being prescient rather than crass in presenting alien planets as monocultures?  Maybe the lizard people who oversee us will only bring us into their interstellar flock when we are one in thought, deed, and salad dressing.  Has anyone considered that?  Huh?  Have they?

Apologies.  I think I may have got a little carried away.

Before I move on, I'll note that there's also a little bit of writer's three-card Monte going on, in that The Hobbit isn't about a dragon, it's about a hobbit.  Clue's in the name.  There's nothing particularly cultural in your choice of hero, unless you see story as a way of being didactic or polemic, and there's far too much of that about.  One of the first things I was taught as a writer is that everybody is a hero in their own story.  This was meant in the sense that every character has their own story, not just Bilbo, but Smaug and the rest of the supporting cast. Everybody is living their own lives, not just serving the hero's quest.  This example is more about changing viewpoints than East Asian mores.

(I also have a recollection that in Shakespeare in Love, the character cast as the apothecary is asked what the play's about.  "It's about an apothecary," he replies.  That said, I can't find evidence of the line on the internet, which further muddies the water by telling me that Tom Wilkinson played that part, whereas my memory has the words clearly falling out of Jim Carter's mouth, so I fear that the whole thing may be a fevered cheese dream.  As you were...)

I'm not going to dwell on Lien's second point, about levels of diversity as it isn't really about story structure, and he doesn't pretend it is.  But I will say that it, too, left me with a feeling of 'so what'.  Maybe it's because I'm European and we haven't experienced the blatant apartheid of the United States or South Africa, but when I read that an 81-year-old is to play Hamlet, or see a young, black, female Mancunian playing Beowulf, I'm not left with a feeling of it going against nature, just interest in how well it's done (very well, in the latter case).  Black people rapping about America's founding fathers?  Not even sure if I find it in any way outré, dangerous, or significant, just delighted we're still thinking of new ways to tell stories.

There's a brilliant comedy on Netflix called 'Ancient Aliens' (it must be a comedy: have you seen Giorgio Tsoukalos' hair?) that would have you believe religious ceremonies are humans acting out the practices of the spacemen who set humanity on its path countless millennia ago. So, this stuff is hardly new.

On to the meat: story structure.  Moral: there's more to life than the three-act structure, for example the distinctly Asian four-act, kishotenketsuo story structure.

Sorry, just not seeing it.

The lesson of Joseph Campbell's Hero's With a Thousand Faces and countless others of its ilk is that, if you dig deep enough, there is only one story structure.  Three acts, four, five or - the model that I tend to write to - eight mini-acts are all just reinterpretations of the simple rule of beginning, middle and end, with an acknowledgement that the middle goes on longer and can be something of a winding path before you reach the endgame.  It's a very flexible framework, I grant you.  If thinking in terms of four acts, or three or eight, helps you work out the best beginning, middle and end then you go for it.  But that's all any of us will have: a beginning, middle and end.

One of the supposedly objective differences that makes kishotenketsuo different is lack of foreshadowing of the third act twist.  Lien used the example of Parasite and that the discovery of the family in the basement is not foreshadowed.

Really?  I thought the relationship between the Kims and the Parks foreshadowed it perfectly, with the Kims finding a family who were to them as they were to their employers.  Indeed, this excellent site cites Director Bong's skill at foreshadowing.  The spaceship appearing at the midpoint of 'The Life of Brian', now that is what a plot element with absolutely no foreshadowing feels like - jarring, baffling, throwing you out of the story, unless done for comic effect, which it is here, and brilliantly so.

I think all we've stumbled upon is a second act midpoint, and the fact that you can do a plethora of different things with it.  Like a pizza, you can divide up 120 minutes or 120,000 words of story in different ways, some of which are sensible, many of which aren't - the placement of advert breaks on Talking Pictures TV provides some excellent examples of the latter - but it's still the same two-hour, novel-length pizza.

Take a look at these as a top ten of movie midpoints.  Parasite sits comfortably in this company.  Actually, of them all, From Dusk till Dawn strikes me as most kishotenketsuo-like on that single criterion.  Korean it most definitely isn't.  (As an aside, I suddenly wondered why 'till' has two l's and 'until' one, and discovered that till isn't a mangled abbreviation but actually came first - who knew?)

I will, though, sign up to the thought that Parasite remade by Hollywood would be an unmitigated disaster.  But I don't think that just comes down to Asian sensibilities not translating. Hollywood doesn't have a great history of remaking foreign properties; as this list attests, their anti-Midas touch affects original material of all colours and creeds.  And it doesn't even touch on the unspeakable interpretations of British comedies.  Personally, I think this has nothing to do with diversity and everything to do with post-1970s La La Land being run by accountants making films primarily for teenage boys.  Look at the golden age of Hollywood and you'll see far greater range and degree of challenge in the film-makers' art.  Don't believe me - imagine pitching this bonkers nonsense today, one of '1001 Films You Must See Before You Die'.  Apparently.

As for the last point - diversity of theme - I think we're back where we started, with different audiences, in whatever way they differ, and the baggage they bring to the party.  The example of Sir Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, I must admit, threw me.  I can't imagine anything more English in tone or theme.  Maybe an Asian reader sees it as Asian?  The main thing I take away from this interview with Sir Kazuo is that it is far more English than Japanese, but far more Kazuo Ishiguro than either.

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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.