Toward the end of last year I was impressed by this Lincoln Michel essay about the flexibility of abstract story structures—and the oddly (not so oddly?) othered way some folks on the internet tend to talk about “non-Western story structures”, for example the Japanese dramatic form of “kishotenkotsu”.
I don’t know much more Japanese than your average kid who watched too much Neon Genesis Evangelion in the 90s and I’ve never studied noh theater with any depth—but the Japanese dramatic structure springs from a Chinese dramatic structure / poetic form written with the same characters (more or less): 起承转合, qi1cheng3zhuan2he2. Each character refers to a separate step in a four-step structure: 起 qi2 — begin, 承 cheng3 — develop, 转 zhuan2 — turn, 合 he2 — resolution. Which (as Lincoln points out in the essay) is a general enough story format to apply to a lot of narratives, including, say, Star Wars and Die Hard.
This versatility is a strength—and it doesn’t mean that qichengzhuanhe is interchangeable with other similarly broad-strokes structures or perspectives on story, like the Freytag triangle or five-act or even, angels and ministers of grace defend us, Save the Cat. Instead, it seems to me that people around the world have been telling stories, and trying to figure out what stories are and what they do, just about as long as there have been anything we’d recognize as people. Leopold Kronecker said of mathematics back in the 19th century: “God made the integers, all else is the work of men.” I’d say: God made story, all else is the work of human hands. (Feel free to ignore the G-word if it’s a stumbling block—I’m reaching here for a sense of given-ness, of something we encounter in the world and must seek to understand.)
Ah, so is structure irrelevant? No—much as non-integer mathematics is useful and revelatory, thinking about structure can offer new perspectives and fruitful approaches to storytelling work.
For example: kishotenkotsu is, as I understand it, a dramatic structure, but qichengzhuanhe from which it derives was originally a poetic structure, rooted in four-line Chinese verse. I see this form in one of my favorite Chinese poems, Li Bai’s 静夜思, often translated into English as Quiet Night Thoughts. Character-by-character translation is dangerous and misleading because it obscures implicit grammatical structures (and for a bunch of other reasons), but for those who don’t read Chinese it can give a limited sense of how the poem moves—as long as you don’t take it too seriously. So here, I’ll give you a four-line breakdown, with the characters, their pronunciation, a character-by-character rendering, and a hackwork translation.
床前明月光,
chuang2 qian2 ming2 yue1 guang1
bed before bright/shining moon light
Before the bed the bright moon shines
疑是地上霜。
yi2 shi4 di4 shang4 shuang3
(doubt/question) is ground top frost
Perhaps it’s ground-top frost
举头望明月,
ju2 tou2 wang1 ming2 yue1
raise head watch bright/shining moon
I raise my head and watch the moon
低头思故乡。
di3 tou2 si1 gu2 xiang1
lower head think (old / country => home)
I lower my head and think of home
Now look, I’m no expert, really I’m no expert in this stuff. But we can map each line of the poem to one of the ‘stages’ or acts of the qichengzhuanhe structure—and what’s developing is not character or intent or “conflict”, it’s image.
We meet the moon at the foot of the bed. What sort of moonlight is it? Comforting moonlight, clarifying moonlight, enchanting moonlight? Line 2 develops the image—both by including a sense of doubt, of indeterminacy, that perhaps, and telling us that the moonlight’s like frost-shine: a sense of cold, uncertainty, eeriness. Distance from reality.
Up to this point the poem does not require a human subject—many translations include a poet’s “I” in the earlier lines but to the best of my understanding the language doesn’t demand one. The first line is purely scene-descriptive. The bed might easily be empty. 疑 yi2 (“doubt/perhaps”) in line 2 introduces a sense of human judgment or conscious activity, of pondering connections, but that could be the poet’s pondering—or the reader’s. I so desperately want to translate ‘yi’ as ‘as if’ or ‘like,’ but the direct simile is too muscular I think, too much the poet telling us the moon’s like frost—it feels that the emphasis here is on a possible connection.
Now, this is one place where character-by-character translation work can cause trouble—there are no pronouns in this poem. Of course, that’s often true in Tang poems, where each character is extremely load-bearing. Would a Tang dynasty reader have recognized an ‘I’ as necessarily implicit in line 2, the way, if I asked you “What are you up to this afternoon?” and you said “Going to the store,” it would be silly for me to think you might mean that someone else was going to the store? But pronouns do show up in Tang poetry—when poets choose to include them. And Li Bai’s also made a decision not to feature them—or even a plausible candidate for a human subject. At least so far.
And then we reach line three—the turn. All of a sudden, someone has a head to raise, someone has eyes and intent to watch. Those first two lines created a kind of vacuum, and the sudden arrival of a human form draws us into the image: the poem closes around us, the late night wakefulness, the strangeness and chill, the brilliance and remove. We are enfolded. It’s a breathtaking turn, as striking as a horn entrance. We are in this scene, awake, unsure, at night—but how does our sudden presence fit with the moon, the frost, the indeterminacy, the distance, the cold?
Line four, then, unites the image of the sleepless person on the bed with the image of the moon to reveal a deeper context that shines back through the preceding lines. Lowering our head, we think of home—because we are not there now. We are far away, and alone. Perhaps in exile. One common significance of the moon in Chinese poetry is that parted friends or lovers might be watching the same moon at the same time, but here we don’t know with any certainty that there’s someone “on the other side” of the moon—much as the poet doesn’t know for certain that anyone will read the poem. The indeterminacy in line 2: we don’t know this room very well. We don’t know how moonlight looks here, or for that matter what frost will look like. We are unsure of ourselves, our place. Will we ever see home again?
Line one introduces an image. Line two develops it. Line three is a turn, the introduction of a new image, a new force. Line four resolves the tension between the two. Characters could be present in any of these steps—or none of them. But something, in this case the image, does emerge, develop, turn, and resolve.
How often, when we think about structure or Freytag or act breaks or whatever, do we center character without realizing that’s a choice? Why not treat image, theme, concept, setting, as that which sets out at the end of Act 1, encounters the dweller at the threshold, enters the underworld, and so on? I don’t know—maybe there are good reasons! But we (I?) so rarely ask the question. Reducing everything to ‘character’ is such a common reflex that when we read books about cities, about aluminum or opium, about rhythm, we’ll say “the main character of this book is the city of Paris,” as if the City of Paris might make a shocking confession of love on page 128, experience the pangs of despair on page 233, or discover in the climactic sword fight on page 384, that the City of Rome was its father. (To be honest I might read that book.) Things other than people do grow, develop, turn, resolve—or we understand them as doing so.
I mean, I get it—it’s that old primates-see-primates-everywhere thing again. We are characters, even to ourselves. Of course we make other things character-shaped. And also: so much of our discussion about story structure in prose fiction, especially in the present moment, roots to and derives from discussions of dramatic structure, that is, the structure of stage plays… and movies, which derive from stage drama. But fiction and poetry are not drama. Human beings stand at the heart of drama—literally, in the case of stage performance. There are whole dramatic forms without stage, backdrop, costume: human bodies in their wonder, complexity, strangeness, nakedness, the simple fact of them.
But in text—for better and worse, and anyway for difference—the body is notable in its absence. The performance endures without the performer, the dance without the dancer. We lack the power of the human face, of the human voice—but in that weakness prose and poetry gain a peculiar, supple sort of freedom. A character doesn’t have to be the center. It could be an image, a city, a cultural movement, a text, a song, a phrase. We can write a story about a city. We can write a story about many cities that are one city. We can write a story about the idea of pockets, about the whiteness of the whale. We can write books that are much more about memory and absence than about any particular remembered or absent person, books about truth and forgery that embrace an entire world of forgers while flaunting the constraints of dramatic unity. We can write love, without particular lovers.
And, of course, we can write about primates too! Nobody’s stopping us. Primates are cool. We can beat NES Tetris, for example. And write about the moon.
Love to see you nerd out about Tang poetry :) I remember the phrase "raise my head and watch the moon associated with you" many years ago -- I honestly am not sure if it was a working title for a book, or your AIM status message -- and it's really cool to see it in context now.
Being myself a huge fan of setting, story, theme, etc. I of course strongly agree with the theory that stories don't have to be, fundamentally, about primates or similars. In some ways, even as we love to write about primates, we also love to find ways of making them a bit different in our stories! A good character in my experience channels an image or a cultural moment. I love the idea of cutting out the middle and writing without character.
(This is on my mind now especially as I'm finally getting through the 5e Sigil books and thinking about stories in the city of doors, which has characters like the Lady of Pain who are less characters and more forces of nature!)