This is a continuation of my Myth and Experience post from December 2010…

Film critic Andre Bazin once came up with an extremely useful analogy. If the purpose of the narrative arts is to get its audience across a stream, then the classical forms are bridges. Each stone, in its placement and dimensions, helps enable the bridge to hold as much as possible with as little as possible. This is elegance of vision and design. So in a good story, every action, every theme, every plot and subplot, and every detail should serve the higher purpose of unifying the experience for the audience.

Remember The Godfather Part II? Early on, old Frankie Pentangeli makes the trip to Vegas to ask Michael for help against the Rosato brothers who were encroaching on Corleone territory back in New York. While waiting for his audience with the young Don, Pentangeli searches the orchestra for one single Italian and, finding it bereft of his paisanos, attempts to lead it in some traditional Italian folk melody. The musicians have a hard time following until they come up with a very American equivalent: “Pop Goes the Weasel”. Pentangeli retreats from the stage in disgust.

So why is this important? Because on one hand you have an amusing scene, but on the other you have the introduction of a crucial theme: Michael Corleone’s separation from his roots and descent into evil. This theme is explored throughout the film, including the flashbacks to Michael’s father a generation ago in Little Italy and culminating with the murder of his brother Fredo. So the scene with the orchestra may not seem important right away, but in hindsight it is. It is a well-placed stone in the bridge that is the entire film.

Bazin’s point was that neorealist films like The Bicycle Thief were not like this at all. Instead of being bridges with some a priori purpose, they were more like rocks that just happen to lie in the stream. Their a posteriori purpose being to support your hands and feet as you amble across as best you can. The experience isn’t so much unified and schematic as real and apparently random just like life. Therein lies its power.

North Carolina writer John Ehle’s The Land Breakers is one such story.

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There are two forces at work that imbue most novels. In classes where they teach the dynamics of storytelling, they’re going to tell you that for a successful story, you need conflict of at a minimum two forces. Antagonist versus protagonist. Man against Fate. Good versus Evil. Conscious versus subconscious. That kind of thing. You also need a beginning, middle, and end in which the conflict is staged. And some kind of resolution when it’s all over.

Of course, this is all true. Aristotle wrote it all down, and for my money we haven’t improved much on his ideas. But these are all crucial forces within a story. When I mentioned forces that “imbue” a novel, in the sense to permeate or pervade, I’m referring to forces outside the story that act upon it. These forces can be brought to bear by exactly two parties: The Author and the Audience (or, really, the Critic, which anyone can be). And you need these forces in order for a novel to have meaning after the story ends.

So what are these forces? I call them the forces of Myth and Experience. But you can think of them as the embodiment of the classic Plato vs. Aristotle dichotomy.

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