The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [71]
Plots organize fiction, and while they can be reasonably sorted into manageable number of types, that in itself does not explain why plots exist. A plot is a structure of actions and events, Aristotle’s “structure incidents.” The events may be fortuitous, but the actions must be motivated, produced by the causality of human intention. Everything Oedipus or any other fictional character does is done for a reason known, unclear, or unknown), whether or not the results of the actions wholly without motivation would test the very idea of a story in the first place. A play in which a man brews a cup of tea, throws it down the drain without tasting it, makes another and throws it out too, and another repeatedly on to the end, might be a Dadaist experiment, or an of an obsessive disorder, but it would be better described as anti-story rather a story. A character’s motivation, as I indicated earlier this chapter, involves the expression of will, normally toward the fulfillment of a desire, and against re sistance or obstruction of some kind.
That a plot was a causal structure, an arrangement of motivations— essence, desire against obstruction—was grasped by Aristotle, who not much interested in plot types beyond comedy and tragedy. Write story about a character, Aristotle argued, and you face only so many logical alternatives. In tragedy, for instance, either bad things happen good person (unjust and repugnant) or bad things happen to a bad person ( just, but boring). Or good things happen to a bad person (unjust again). Tragic poignancy requires that bad things happen to a good flawed person: although he may not have deserved his awful fate, through his arrogance Oedipus was asking for it. In the same rational spirit, Aristotle works out dramatic relations. A conflict between strangers natural enemies is of little concern to us. What arouses interest is hate-filled struggle between people who ought to love each other—the mother who murders her children to punish her husband, or two brothers who fight to the death. Aristotle knew this for the drama of his age much as soap opera writers know it today.
Aristotle’s thoughts on stories and drama endure because of his basic insight that the substance of drama is action and the emotions that it. The themes of Greek drama are built on such emotions as erotic familial love, a sense of honor, civic loyalty, the inevitability death, and so forth. For his part, Booker has not discovered archetypes the Jungian sense, hardwired blueprints, for story plots: what he identified is the deep themes that fascinate us in fictions. An analogy make this clear: survey the architectural layout of most people’s homes and you will find persis tent patterns amid the variety. Bedrooms separated from kitchens. Kitchens are close to dining rooms. Front doors do not open onto children’s bedrooms or toilets. Are these watch television. Whenever life becomes prosperous enough families to dwell in buildings with separate rooms, they will do so, patterns of use and relationship begin to emerge. These room patterns follow not from mental imprints but from the functions of the rooms themselves, which in turn follow from other values of family relationships, preferences in food preparation, attitudes toward sex, possibilities privacy, and so forth.
So it is with stories. The basic themes and situations of fiction are a product of fundamental, evolved interests human beings have in death, adventure, family, justice, and overcoming adversity. “Reproduction and survival” is the evolutionary slogan, which in fiction is translated straight into the eternal themes of love and death for tragedy, and marriage for comedy.