MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 1

In essays such as THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD PART II, I’ve compared the organization of fictional narratives to the ways in which students are taught to structure their compositions around a “theme statement.” I never developed that line of thought, but of late it’s struck me that there’s a parallel between the general idea of a “theme statement” and my concept of the “focal presence,” insofar as both are organizing principles. But there is a salient distinction between the two.

According to my lit-crit system, the focal presence is allied to a narrative’s lateral meaning, the combination of the kinetic and the dramatic, of the things that physically happen to characters and how they feel about it. The focal presence denotes the narrative’s centricity, which in keeping with my observations in STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, does not require vertical meaning in order to engage a reader’s conviction.

In contrast, any “theme statement”—a term I will soon replace with one more apt for my purposes—must correlate principally with vertical meaning. This meaning, as I’ve mentioned earlier, can be represented by didactically presented ideas, mythopoeically presented symbols, or (in the words of Janis Joplin) a “combination of the two.” I’ve frequently pictured these vertical meanings as either being “over” or “under” a narrative’s lateral meaning, but for current purposes maybe it might be better to imagine them as many disparate threads running through the (potentially) labyrinthine structure of the narrative. A single narrative can incorporate more than one vertical meaning. However, to be coherent said narrative needs what I’ll henceforth call a “master thread.”

Since standard theme statements emphasize didactic meanings, I won’t spend a lot of time on that topic. I'll confine myself to stating that two given narratives can both possess the requisite master thread, but one can be better developed than the other (for instance, Upton Sinclair’s socialist diatribe in THE JUNGLE is far less compelling than Charles Dickens’ “anti-utilitarian argument” in HARD TIMES—not simply because I personally favor one over the other, but because the latter possessed greater intellectual elaboration than the former.

I have a great deal more to say about the ways mythopoeic master threads disport themselves, coming up in Part 2.