Middletwist

A sidestep can break the monotony

Mid-point as Mirror

Yesterday in Middlemarch I spoke about the mid-point of a long tale. The middle of a long tale is like a wilderness, because it strays so far from the sure anchor points of start and end, and talesmen and audiences alike can get lost in it. The details of the scenes at hand overwhelm, the heroes hack in the undergrowth, there is action and movement but no sure sense of getting toward the goal.

One way to break up this long march is to highlight the mid-point; this breaks the middle into two parts, each of which is smaller than the whole thing. If this mid-point relates somehow to the final goal in some demonstrable, sensible way, it provides either false hope or false despair as to whether the hero will be able to achieve his end or not. And in general, since the second curtain’s effect is to deny the final result, so that if the end will be happy, the second curtain will reach the height of despair, and if the end will be tragic, the second curtain will make the goal seem at hand. Under this model, the mid-point should mirror the second curtain even as the second curtain mirrors the end. Thus, a happy end provokes a dour second curtain, which provokes a happy mid-point. This gives the tale a general zigzag, up-and-down pattern: up to the mid-point then down to the second curtain then up to the end, or down at the mid-point, up at the second curtain, and down at the end.

Mid-point as Twist

Another way to make the mid-point stand out is to introduce a twist. A ‘twist’ is not a reversal, but rather a step to the side — something unexpected that set the hero off on a new path.

This twist, broadly speaking, is not a reminder of start or end, and thus does not serve as a milepost on the tale’s journey. Rather it offers some relief along the seemingly-endless march through the middle.

One way to combine twist and mirror-point is to follow a pattern I can illustrate by looking at the tale of a quest. In a quest, the hero seeks something, and must journey to find it. So let’s say the hero hears that the Grail lies in a mythical town of Potzrebie. At the mid-point, the hero at last finds his way into Potzrebie … only to learn that the Grail is not there! This then gives him a new clue to go somewhere else (or even to return to the source of the lie that the Grail was in Potzrebie) and a new path is laid out.

This approach gives us a double-mirror point for mid-point, in that

1. the hero gains his goal (Potzrebie) which has equaled the end of getting the Grail
2. the hero is at despair since the Grail is not after all in Potzrebie; this then seems to be the end of the road, setting him back at his starting-point.

But there are twists that do not serve this double function, and simply come as unexpected turns of events. These twists freshen the tale, and cause us in the audience to look at things in a new light, and reconsider our basic assumptions.

As such, these twists are not logical bases for marking out the mid-point, such as the mirrored mid-point offers. Rather they are tactical in nature.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, May 22, 2008)