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.
No comments:
Post a Comment