One structural difference between folktales and modern genre novels
Bardelys was thinking on the Russian folktales, when he realized something new: they were backwards. Not only did they have happy endings (and sad beginnings) but the inflection point was only about one-third of the way in, rather than one-third of the way from the end.
In standard screenplay and playwriting schools, he had been taught that if the ending was to be a happy one, the Second Curtain must be sad. This is the ‘black moment’ that many screenwriting teachers harp on, that had been drummed into Bardelys’s very soul in his tutelage in Southern California. It had now become an elementary notion in his approach to talesmanship.
But the Russian folktales had a different plan. Their structure introduced the hero, and quickly brought him to a dire passage. From this point the fate turns kind, and we follow the hero’s long ascent, enjoying every turn along the way.
Another difference is the simplicity and smoothness of the descent and ascent. In screenplay and modern novel, the rise and fall are both jagged, and more natural or even, Bardelys thought wryly, ‘organic.’ In a general rising movement, there are subordinate ups and downs; they also appear in a general falling movement.
Part of the difference, Bardelys was convinced, lay in the relative lengths of the tales. The folktale can be told in an evening – even an hour – even a half-hour. The novel is a somewhat more filling and substantial meal. Indeed, the novel developed in its heyday as a serial, published daily or weekly, and written in instalments. It might take a full year for a long Dickens tale to reach its final periodical instalment.
Thus, the oral tale must quickly get to its point and move on to its end. But the novel must undulate, variegate its pitch and movement, must rise and fall and rise again, must play with its readers’ emotions.
Bardelys remembered one description of the writing of a novel: like walking from Barcelona to the Pacific coast – on your knees. Something of the sort was also the experience of the one reading the novel. It is a long passage.
This also plays its part: the struggle must be won, if a happy ending is to eventuate, but it must be won honestly and at some effort, some cost. The reader must feel a real danger that the happy ending might not come to pass.
Here again, Bardelys saw a difference, not in the forms, but in the wider context of the different audiences for the folktale and the novel. Novel-readers have become an awfully jaded lot. And a sophisticated one. We all know the patterns, for we have met them all many times before. Thus it takes great skill and cleverness, and earnest effort, on the talesman’s part, to (at least in part) convince us that the hero might not get his just desserts at tale’s end. This requires a long struggle on the hero’s part, and it needs that things get worse for him, worse and worse, and more and more dire, until, at last…
The folktale is like a cookie.
The novel is like a banquet.
(Composed on keyboard Monday, September 29, 2008)
