Tragedy, farce, and other, rarer modes: a post on Kafka

In almost any interesting narrative, everything happens at least twice. The first time to set the rules of this here kind of fictional event, so that the second time its stakes and its moves are intelligible to the audience. That intelligibility may be necessary to the protagonist too -- the first time may occur as practice, in the Smersh training circuit, on the flight simulator, in the dojo, in the school yard (no less in The Wire or in Buffy than in the opening of Abel Gance's Napoleon). Or it may be only there for us, as when Chigurh flips his coin to determine his suppliants' fate in No Country for Old Men.

It's really hard to think of a story with an interesting plot that doesn't rhyme incidents in this way: Madame Bovary, Proust, Austen, Waiting for Godot, any Shakespeare play, Dickens, Fielding, Tolstoy (well, maybe not Tolstoy: there may be something of Kafka in him). It's the principle of revenge stories as of love stories. It is to be found in every fairy tale. Hansel drops stones and the children find their way home. The second time he drops bread-crumbs and they don't. The wolf blows down two of the pigs' houses, and then he fails.

There's one obvious reason, to which I plan to return in a later post, for this repetition (sometimes multiple repetition as in the story of the three little pigs as well as the story of Goldilocks). Events in narrative had better be doing at least double duty. They are interesting in themselves, but they also convey information crucial to the set-up of later and still more interesting events, events that make the narrative particularly interesting, events that particularize the interest of this narrative. Narratives have to teach you the rules of the game they're playing (or in genre fiction the rules of the variant of the game that they're playing), for you to appreciate the moves made according to those rules. A Swedish client of my father's visited the U.S. in 1956 for the first time, and his host took him to see Game 5 of that year's World Series. The client was bored out of his mind. Nothing happened, that he could see: every Dodger batter who went to the plate returned to the dugout.  Don Larsen retired every single one, pitching the only perfect game in World Series history. But the Swedish client didn't know the rules, and he missed the unbelievably exciting experience that he was present at.

If a narrative doesn't set up its own rules early, and then follow the constraints imposed by those rules, you get only chronicles, what E. M. Foster calls plot as opposed  story. Such constraints don't only include whether people can fly in this fictional world or not; whether animals can talk or not; they include subtler things like establishing the balance between consistency and freedom in a character, between a character's capacity to act surprisingly and gratuitously and our sense that a character is acting plausibly, consistently with what we know about her and what she has become at some point in a narrative. Such rules will also include psychological rules about how much time or experience can change characters: is their psychology Jamesian? Dickensian? Woolfian? Proustian? Is remorse or repentance or degeneration or despair possible in their fictional world?

An interesting vignette about such a change, early on, will sound the note for the possibilities of such changes over the course of the narrative. As with so much of Eliot, the opening two of Daniel Deronda makes the point explicitly:

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.


Was she beautiful or not beautiful?

The first paragraph tells us how to read the question that opens the second: we are at an arbitrary moment that nevertheless tells us that there are four different directions, towards four quadrants in the narrative field, that the curve of the story might trace. We know both that a character might be difficult to pin down, and, what's more, that he might be difficult to pin down because he has difficulty pinning another character down.  Daniel's difficulty says something crucial both about Gwendolyn and about himself, and the possibilities of their respective adventures are given by the narrative anecdote with which the book opens, and by the narrative vignette with which that anecdote opens.

There's a chaotic dialectic between randomness and determinism in good narrative, a dialectic itself stabilized by the practice of repetition, often as with Eliot in the mode of self-similarity, where repetitions occur across different orders of magnitude.  A good narrative approximates a Koch Curve:

From Wikimedia: as we zoom in on the curve you can see its every part is made up of similar parts

To take some obvious narrative examples, in a trust narrative, a character must learn either trust or suspicion.  She'll learn them on the basis of an early narrative experience, and the mode may either be once burned, twice shy or first antagonistic, later life-saving.  The second schema is to be found in any number of heart-warming narratives, from Huck Finn to Lisbeth Salander's relation to Mikael Blomqvist.  Of course you can get various combinations of the two, meta-versions where modes of repetition are themselves repeated with a difference.

Indeed the second story probably requires the first: "Once burned, twice shy" is the reason a character may start out antagonistic; if she becomes life-saving afterwards, what's happened is that once burned, twice shy has been repeated with a difference.  If the once burned, twice shy part of the story is itself well told, so that trust leads to distrust, the return to trust will require all that much more narrative invention, force, resourcefulness, and management of the relation between the audience's desire and its knowledge.  These are things that Dickens and Homer do particularly well.  The rightly suspicious Achilles trusts Priam in the end, and Priam trusts him; the rightly suspicious Odysseus trusts Penelope, and she trusts him.

If we put this very schematically, we can describe Frye's four basic narrative arcs in terms of such repetitions.  The replacement of a sad event with its happy repetition is comedy.  The replacement of a happy event with its sad repetition is tragedy.  Happy to happy is farce.  Sad to sad is melodrama.  Again, these things can occur on meta-levels, some more self-similar, some less, again with different emotional outcomes.

I was thinking about this because I was thinking about Kafka's fairy tale openings.  They're so hard to write -- no one trusts themselves any more with this kind of unexplained directness, which seems a feature of oral memory, not of meditation and invention. In the twentieth century maybe only Kafka ever wrote them convincingly.  Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant insect: so do fairy tales begin.  The Emperor has a message for you.

All the fairy tales that open in this way would repeat their incidents in a way that advanced towards some conclusion with a difference.  You wake up as a bug and later on, when you wake up as a tree your experiences as a bug will help you negotiate your new, arboreal circumstances.  The Emperor's message comes, or doesn't, and later on when you hear a more important message has been sent, you'll know how to insure that you receive it in time this time.  Leopards break into the temple, and later on they'll become a part of the ceremony.

But, in Kafka, what almost always happens -- this is the rarer mode -- is that things only happen once.  You wake up as a bug, and that's it.  You stay a bug and nothing rhymes with that experience.  You don't get the message.  You don't get to the next village. The first part of the book will be about getting to the Castle.  K. never gets there.  Or it will be about waiting for the trial.  But the climax never comes. Once you pass the first stage and enter the doorway of the Law, that's when things will get complicated.  But you never enter the doorway.  God calls unto Abraham to sacrifice his son!  Abraham assumes some other Abraham was meant: he can't be important enough for this test.  Fairy tales without the repetition that offers narrative satisfaction: that's the amazing thing in Kafka.

Narrative and information - part I: kibbitzing, rooting, side-bets

An idea basic to game theory is that players will play their best moves, if there is one, that what defines your best move is in part determined by what defines the other player's best move, and vice versa. This means that playing a move in a game in which the players have incomplete information (most of them: Old Maid, Stratego, Bridge, Blackjack) always conveys some information: not only the trivial fact that a player has made this move, but that this move is the best one they could make in their position.

Interesting games, then, are those in which players have to balance their provisional best move against the valuable information that making any move, no matter what it is, will divulge.  Bidding in bridge provides a good example of this dynamic: the cost of getting trumps in your long suit is a declaration of what cards you're likely to have, based on how much you're willing to pay to make those cards trumps.  But Clue is essentially the same (what information are you looking for, what are you pretending not to have, what are you pretending you do have?) as is poker: even five-card draw: are you taking two or three cards? two cards might mean three of a kind, but if it's a bluff based on a pair and a third card, you've also reduced your chances of drawing to three of a kind considerably.

Bluffing is a way of trying to convey disinformation: part of what will make a player decide that bluffing is her best move is that it's disguised as a different 'best' move.  If it looks like my best move is to take two cards, then it looks like I have three of a kind.  Conversely, I might pay to keep information secret, for example by taking only one card with three of a kind to try to convince you that I only have two pairs: doing this cuts my chances of getting four of a kind in half (to 1/47).

Now, the game I am interested in is that between story and audience.  Stripped down this is a two-person game, but that may be too idealizing since we have to take into account Author, narrator, narratee, other audience members, and (following David Markson) Reader.  Have to take them into account because the question of rooting comes up.  In fact I think that one of the most important tasks of the mildly game-theoretical account of narrative I am trying to work out is to figure out the game that rooters and kibbitzers are playing.

I want to press the similarity between rooting and making a side-bet, that is to say, playing a game.  Rooting for a preferred outcome in a fiction and rooting (as the faithful do) for the Red Sox are different, but they do share a structure: those whose faith in their preferred outcome is vindicated get bragging rights over those who wanted something different, but also over those whose preferred outcome was the same but who were of little faith.

So there are two different types I might make a side-bet against: the serenely confident malevolent (those who wish the wrong thing); and the benevolent faithless (who wish the right thing but doubt it will happen).

In narrative, the malevolent (leaving Oscar Wilde's laughter aside) tend to be villains in the piece (including sometimes author and narrator).  Whereas those of little faith will often be found in the piece, but also found on our side of the narrative divide, in the narratee and in other audience members.  Obvious examples of the malevolent include the head-suitor Antinous in the Odyssey, Don John in Much Ado, Oswald and Edmund in King Lear, Blifel in Tom Jones, Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park, Mr. Elton in Emma, Mr. Grimwig in Oliver Twist, La Cousine Bette, Madame Merle in Portrait of a Lady, Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) in Casablanca, and also Captain Renault (Claude Rains), and Father Gomez in The Amber Spyglass.  These examples show that there are various ways that the malevolent may lose their bets: they may consciously have to realize and suffer the judgment the narrative gods visit upon them (Antinous, Don John, Blifel, Strasser, Mary Crawford, Mr. Elton, Madame Merle); they may change their bets, often just in time (Edmund, Grimwig, Captain Renault, also Mary Crawford); they may think that their bets will eventually be vindicated, even after their deaths (Oswald, Father Gomez, Major "King" Kong [Slim Pickens, riding the bomb like a cowboy hellbent for hell] in Dr. Strangelove).  And sometimes the malevolent win their bets -- which is to say that the outcome of the story does not confute the obnoxious line they take: (Rodolphe in Madame Bovary, for example, possibly Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra).  And sometimes, especially in Shakespeare, you get characters who seem to combie all these seemingly incompatible positions simultaneously, like Edmund and, the villain of villains in Shakespeare, Iago.¹

What makes Flaubert Flaubert is that we have to live with that. And this fact, the fact that Emma isn't vindicated, as we in our Balzac-trained naïveté might have bet she would, the fact that we've lost our standing bet on novelistic satisfaction helps shed light on a feature of side-betting that might at first make it look somewhat different than the main game. When I bid one heart in bridge I'm suggesting something like being long in hearts (depending on the convention, of course; but as my bids get higher, they become more straightforward declarations of the hand I'm holding); when I bid one heart reading Flaubert (after all I've loved Un Cœur Simple), I don't seem to affect the play - either in the main game Emma and Rodolphe are playing, nor in the side-bets between me and the more cynical reader, nor between me and the narratee.

Well does my bet, my play, convey any information?  A move needn't convey information, but I think that in any interesting game it does, so now the question would be, are the side-bets that I make, against the more cynical reader or the narratee, the only moves that I make?  Or might these side-bets also convey information to the author or the narrator?  And if so, how?  How do I affect the past, the already written text, the already scripted play, the already filmed movie?

Notice that this question also pertains to the narratee, who inhabits a peculiar temporal space, more peculiar than the narrator's, since she is learning the story as I learn it, even though she's an already completed creation of the story.  The narrator is like the Augustinian God in Paradise Lost: outside of time, having arranged the whole story, so that any moment of the telling includes what is to come as well as what has happened and what is occurring now. Indeed Augustine compares God's command of the whole of time to the knowledge of a psalm, that is a literary text, where every moment contains within it the compression of the whole.²  But the narratee knows only what has come before, and what is happening now, though she will certainly be predicting and anticipating how the story will unfold.

Let's begin by asking the slightly easier converse question: what information does the narratee's taking the opposite bet convey to me? For one thing the narratee (and more subtly, the other audience members) represent for me a possible outcome to the story - a possible pathway which helps map the terrain the actual pathway finds its way through.  Now, I can sometimes get this information very explicitly, from a narratee as character (e.g. Belford or Anna Howe, receiving a letter from Lovelace or Clarissa), or from a worrying or gloating window character (Horatio, Enobarbus, Poins), or from a Chorus, sometimes continuous with the other audience members (as in some of the sly induction scenes in Elizabethan drama).

But sometimes I can only get this information from narratees (and also from other audience members, in the silence of a theater) who say nothing and indicate nothing about what their own anticipations are.  I have to understand what they -- the narratees, the expected interpreters -- must be thinking.  The author or narrator has to give me to understand their thoughts or reactions.  James may be the writer who most explicitly makes this into a theme: we need to think like Isabel Archer or Merton Densher or Maggie Verver, to understand exactly what the silences of Madame Merle and Osmond, of Milly Theale, of the Prince and indeed of Adam Verver, must mean.  Adam Verver is of course the crowning case here: everything depends on Maggie's understanding everything his complete inscrutability (inscrutable to the point of its not being clear whether he's inscrutable or not) might signify.

So the side-bets are bets between me and a silent narratee (the last narratee, the person over whose shoulder I am always reading or watching, is always silent).  Since the interest of narrative always includes wishful thinking (if I weren't wishing I wouldn't be interested), I bet that there's still a way for things to work out.  I take some vicarious pleasure in thinking the narratee thinks there isn't a way for things to work out.  That pleasure is generous, at least seen from the right perspective: the narratee will, I am sure, be delighted that things work out, and I anticipate that delight with delight. The narratee will be delighted to lose, so in a sense it's a win-win situation.

But on the other hand, the narratee is betting against me, in her stony, silent, hsst-don't-bother-me way.  She doesn't think things will work out at all.  She thinks I'm naive.

So we're both conveying information in our bets, in our moves.  This information is moral, you could say, or characterological.  I show my naivete, perhaps, my naive love of fiction, or my bent towards the fictitious. I stand for wish-fulfillment and fantasy.  The narratee shows her disabused knowledge of reality.  The world doesn't work in the lovely-to-think-so way I want it to work.

This information is important to the fictional interaction.  It sets up the stakes of the fiction.  In the conflict between life and wish-fulfillment, will wish-fulfilment find a way?  How much reality can I know is true, can the narratee emblematize, without the destruction of the wish?  The balance is different in different genres, along different dimensions of ambition: commitment to truth, to life, to hope, to cleverness, to seriousness, to verisimilitude, etc.  Our side bets bring out these different dimensions, bring them into relief, so that they become part of the story, part of the stakes of the story.  The information these moves reveal is part of the story-information.

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¹ Who, Trilling points out, is the only character identified as a villain in the original dramatum personae.  (Trilling doesn't point out that only seven of the First Folio plays have lists of the "Names of the Actors" as it calls them.)  Here's what the Othello list looks, like:

[Brandeis University First Folio]

You ask, What's right under "The Names of the Actors"?  X-P

² Leonardo will later point the same thing out about the focal point in a camera obscura: the entire image is compressed into a single point before decompressing upside down.  That spatial point in the camera obscura is analogous to the temporal instant in Augustine's and Milton's thinking.