This wilderness has two logical mileposts. You may need more.
Three Acts
Aristotle split a play (and by extension all tales) in three. Though a play may have one act, five acts or more, and a movie may have eight or ten sequences, and a short-short story no more than fifty words, these divisions are technical at heart and not logical, not necessary. So what then are the logical parts of the tale? Let’s start at the smallest number and work our way up to see.
One Part. We could say a tale has but one part, that is — itself. This is logically true. But it gets us nowhere; we can’t do anything more once we say this. So this is true, but of no use.
Two Parts. We could say a tale has two parts. These would be the Start and the End. But to leap from Start straight to End makes for a weak tale at best, one so weak I don’t know if we could call it a tale at all. Think of:
Once there was a poor man.
Then he was rich.
The end.
Here we can’t even tell it in this way:
Once there was a poor man.
He got a lot of money.
Then he was rich.
The end.
— because the phrase ‘he got a lot of money’ is not the Start, nor is it the End. This is the middle and in truth, don’t we love the middle most of all? In this tale the hero has a problem of want, which is a thing we all face at some point in our lives. He ends in plenty. But because we in the audience have all shared in want, it’s just the ‘how he got plenty’ that interests us. More, we can say that we are glad to see the hero have plenty only as far as we have shared his pain of want, his fight to get more, and the ups and downs of ‘how he got plenty.’ The quick leap from want to plenty does nothing for us, we feel cheated or we feel nothing at all. A moment has passed for us while we heard it told, we blink once or twice, we go on with our lives and we forget this ‘tale’ right off. It has had no weight for us without the ‘how he got plenty’ of the middle, it has no lesson, no thrill, no plain or joy.
Three Parts. This is what Aristotle thought, that a tale has its three parts and three (logical) parts only: the Start, the Middle, & the End. So we can have our tale as told the second time, with Want (the start), How he got more (the middle) and Plenty (the end.).
This makes a true tale, one that satisfies us. The ‘how he got plenty’ can be stretched as long as the talesman please, it can have false ends and it can turn the hero round so he seems almost back where he started. All the same these many scenes and sequences and chapters and thousands of words can be summed up: ‘He got a lot of money.’
Four Parts. Now we have three logical parts, and they are all we need to make a tale. But let’s look at four parts and see if they might not make the tale better. How could we tell it in four?
Once there was a poor man.
He tried to get rich and failed.
At last he got a lot of money.
Then he was rich.
The end.
This version of the tale has two parts for its middle. There is a fight that ends in loss, then a second fight that succeeds. It’s true the added turn of the loss gives the fight more weight, and helps us share the hero’s end in Plenty. We feel closer to him now. We may even feel he earns his wealth more when we see how he fought and failed on the way.
The tale is better, but speaking logically can we say that there are four parts? Or should we say the Middle here covers two sentences?
We might look at this ‘four part’ tale as two tales joined as one:
Once there was a poor man.
He tried to get rich and failed.
He was still poor.
The end.Once there was a poor man.
He got a lot of money.
Then he was rich.
The end.
Logically speaking, then, we can always boil a four-part tale down to three, or a series of simpler three-part tales. And so we find for five- and eight- and twelve-part tales. We could also split the Start in two, the flat scenes of the hero’s state before the First Encounter, and then the First Encounter itself.
So I’ll join Aristotle and say a tale has but three logical parts. Let’s look at the main turns of the Middle.
The Two Turns of the Middle
The Middle has two big scenes: the Start of the Middle and the End of the Middle. Now we could look at the Middle as a tale in itself. Since it has its Start and its End, why can’t it have its Middle? It must in truth have its flat, that scene or string of scenes that lay the ground for and build up our hope and fear for the scene at the End of the Middle. But this doesn’t need any heart-scenes — in a short tale a flat will do. So we are left with only those logical two big scenes in the Middle.
The Start of the Middle
I have seen a few ways to say what goes on at the Start of the Middle. My old teacher, Frank Daniel, studied the great dramatists and dramatic theorists of the 19th century in Europe, most of all the French. He said that a tale comes out of a predicament that must be resolved. For Frank, the Start of the Middle (or First Curtain in a three-act play) is the scene where the predicament is fixed. From that scene on, we know the hero can’t ignore or escape the predicament, and he can’t walk away, whether he chose the predicament in the first place or it sprang on him unawares, like a trap.
(Frank also taught that the Start had to lay all the ground for the audience to understand the terms of the predicament and what resolving the predicament would mean, and what it would look like.)
Another way to look at the Start of the Middle comes from another of my teachers, Bob Miller. He said that the Start of the Middle is the scene where the hero ‘takes on’ the Problem (which is the same thing Frank called the Predicament) so that he can’t or won’t let it go until it’s resolved.
I like both these ways of looking at the Start of the Middle, but I tend to think of it in other terms. I do agree with Frank that the Predicament must be established, and with Bob that the hero at this point takes on the Problem, willy-nilly as it may be. But I like to see the Start of the Middle more in terms of the structure of the logical whole of the tale:
The Start of the Middle is the scene that looks forward to and heralds the End of the End of the tale.
When I say the Start of the Middle ‘looks forward to and heralds’ the end, I mean much what Frank meant when he said that this scene must conclude the act of laying all the ground for the Predicament. The scene ‘looks forward’ to the end in that it tells us what the goal is, what the Predicament or Problem is. In the case of our hero in want, his poverty is his Problem, and the Start of the Middle might be when he vows to become rich, or it might be a scene where he dreams of being rich with such an ache that he can’t help but go out looking for riches from then on. And the scene ‘heralds’ the end in that it lets us clearly know what the end will look like or feel like when we reach it.
This does not mean it predicts the end. The end may still be win or it may be lose. But we will know what winning and losing will look like when they come.
This point is at the heart of the Start of the Middle and it is shared among all three descriptions given here: when the audience hears the big scene that is the Start of the Middle, they know what kind of tale they are about to hear, they know the ground on which the tale will walk. And they know two ends that may come of it when the talesman wraps it up. One end the audience hopes will come true. One end the audience fears lest it come to pass.
The balance of this hope and this fear is where the talesman plays his audience, and the turns we feel from hope to despair are what at base we love in tales, and why we want to hear them.
The End of the Middle
The other big scene the Middle needs is the End of the Middle (or Second Curtain in a three-act play). this is not the End of the End — it does not wrap up the tale or even seem to do so. It does teeter on the brink of what might be the End of the End, though, and this brink is what the audience fears might be the end — the worst of all possible ways the tale might end up.
The End of the Middle lies one step away from what might be the End of the End. And yet, something is lacking. There is one thread not yet tied off. There is one more step that must be taken, and this step is not a sure one in fact, that step will not be taken, it will be another step in its place, and the step we do take will lead us into the End with its subordinate parts.
Take up our poor man once more. What do we hope, what do we fear for him? We hope that he finds plenty, and fear lest he die in want.
(Or we might turn this tale on its head if we let the audience understand that the one way he might win wealth would come at the price of his child’s life. Does he love wealth more, or the child? In this case we might hope he loves his child more and fear lest he take the path to wealth. But this way of looking at tales brings in aspects of the hero and his Want where it might not be the same as his Need — and that is another tale for another day.)
If we hope he wins wealth, then the End of the Middle might come when his last try at wealth is about to fail. It has failed — or at least it seems that it has. The man is about to give up all hope. He has lost hope — or at least it almost seems so. And yet, and yet…
And yet something is amiss. The last try has not yet utterly failed. The man has not lost all his hope. He can still make one last effort within the try — maybe not to win all, but at least to save something for later, to stave off the final defeat, that defeat from which there can be no coming back. Or there may be something he has for the moment lost track of. This may be something he knows and has forgotten, or some skill he has, or some object he has not yet used, or has not used in the right way. Or it may be a friend or ally who can come to his aid. Or it may be some weakness or whim or fluke in the nature of what defeats the man (his foe, or the forces that block his path), and the weakness, whim or fluke turns back whatever it is that works against the man’s hopes and leaves him not quite defeated, not quite unable to rise once more.
In short what comes right after the End of the Middle is still unfinished, and there is just the slightest cause for us to hope that all is not yet told. Or it might be that the final upturn, what J.R.R. Tolkien called the ‘eucatastrophe’ in fairy tales, that brings of a sudden the final victory, ‘victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.’
In the words of John Carter of Barsoom, ‘I still live.’
Wilderness
The Middle of long tales, such as novels and epics and sagas, has been called a wilderness, a vast wasteland, and the part of the tale that gives the talesman fits to cross. In long tales, a simple series of flat scenes that lay the grounds for the End of the Middle scene would go on too long for us to bear. We would itch and stir and yawn and wonder what’s for dinner long before the talesman brought us to the End of the Middle.
So for long tales we will need some heart-scenes in between the Start of the Middle and the End of the Middle. These are not logical parts to the tale, and so they can’t be logically foreseen and told of beforehand. This is part of what makes the long Middle such a chore to tell. But that’s another tale for another day.
(Composed with pen on paper Monday 18 February 2008)
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