When I began writing this blog, its subject was narrative theory. I thought I had worked out a radical new way of interpretively tackling stories. For a paper I'm studying this semester, I was tasked with analysing a text with respect to an established literary theory, such as the narrative theories developed by Levi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell; my lecturer graciously allowed me to pitch my own theory and analyse a story in terms of this one rather the another. The day after dispatching my essay on Sunday, I had an epiphany; the theory that I had developed many years ago was wrong and I had conceived a better one. In tonight's post I thought I would upload the essays I wrote, the first an exposition of the theory and the second an analysis of the film West Side Story. The theory proposed is the old one, not the new improved model. I may write about the superior version in a later post or I may not, depending on whether I feel I'm being original or simply reinventing the wheel, unintentionally parroting something someone else has said, depending on how I feel.
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A Narrative Theory
The theory I wish to propose did not emerge from a vacuum. In The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946) Lajos Egri proposed that at the heart of any story is a premise, a simple statement or proposition that guides the process of writing the work. For example he argues that, at its heart, Romeo and Juliet is founded on the premise: “True love defies even death.” Egri contends that many dramatic works fail because the playwright isn’t clear what his or her premise is, doesn’t know what he or she is trying to say. What Egri calls the premise, Robert McKee in Story (1997) calls the controlling idea. McKee also introduces the term counter-idea which is important to my own theory. Rereading McKee many years after I first read it, I find my own theory more derivative of this section of his than I thought. This is disappointing. Still, perhaps there may be differences which make my own theory a least a little original.
In my theory, a story is a piece of rhetoric: that is, it is an exercise in persuasion seeking to convince the audience of the truth of some simple statement or proposition. This rhetorical objective guides the whole endeavour. Often, although not always, this proposition is one the audience wants to believe and so wants to be persuaded of. In my own theory this proposition, what Egri calls a premise and McKee calls a controlling idea, I call a thesis. A story is an argument. Not only does a story present a thesis it also simultaneously or alternately presents an antithesis, a statement that contradicts or is incompatible with the thesis. A story argues for both thesis and antithesis at the same time and this is what creates conflict. (These two terms, thesis and antithesis are also used by Levi-Strauss and Hegel, but I am using them in a different way.) To persuade the audience of the truth of the thesis, the antithesis should ideally be presented as strongly as possible; however, even though the antithesis should always be presented more strongly than the thesis, at the end the thesis always wins. One can distinguish between the thesis and antithesis by the way a story ends.
Some examples can illustrate this theory. The thesis of Star Wars is “Good always triumphs over Evil”; the antithesis is “Evil sometimes triumphs over Good”. For much of Star Wars it seems more likely that Evil will defeat Good rather than the inverse, because the forces of Evil are so much more powerful than the forces of Good. The fact that Good still triumphs serves as proof that the thesis must be true. In Sleepless in Seattle, the thesis is “True love overcomes all obstacles” and the antithesis is “Sometimes the obstacles are too great”. The absolute truth of the thesis is demonstrated by the fact that the two lovers get together even though they live on opposite coasts of the US. The thesis of Romeo and Juliet is “Sometimes the obstacles to true love are too great” and the antithesis is “True love conquers all”: it is the opposite of Sleepless in Seattle and most romantic comedies in this respect. Romeo and Juliet is dedicated to an existential rather than universal proposition and this is partly what makes it a tragedy. (I think, by the way, that Egri’s summation of this play, quoted above, is wrong, that he was fooled into thinking that the antithesis was the thesis because the love story is presented so powerfully.) In Pulp Fiction, the antithesis is “It’s cool to be a gangster” and the thesis is “Being a gangster gets you killed”. The gangsters seem so cool, the antithesis is again presented so strongly, it is easy to forget that the story (told non-linearly) in ‘real-time’ ends with Vincent Vega’s death and Marcellus Wallace’s buggering, and in ‘film-time’ with Jules deciding to retire from the gangster life because he has received what he thinks is a sign from God that if he doesn’t he will perish. It can be compared to Trainspotting. The rebellious teen lifestyle of heroin addiction is presented as so cool it is easy to forget that at the end Renton “chooses life”.
The theory has limitations. It applies well to films, plays and short stories but applies less well to novels such as Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow which are too sprawling to be boiled down into two simple competing statements; insofar as a story has unity, however, it should ideally have both a strong grounding thesis and antithesis. A second problem with the theory is that it risks becoming overly simplistic. Star Wars, Crusaders of the Lost Arc and The Lord of the Rings could all be said to be concerned with persuading an audience that “Good always triumphs over evil” but this would be to overlook the significant differences between the three films. Thirdly, this theory is principally concerned with narrative unity and says little about narrative structure. Traditional theories of narrative structure, such as the time-tested wisdom that stories can usually be divided into three acts, may be considered a complement to this theory rather than a rival to it, do not impinge upon it, because the theory itself says nothing about structure.
As I said in the introduction, when looking back into Robert McKee’s work, I found this theory, which I thought my own, more derivative of this section in his book than I realised. I don’t know if McKee’s concepts 'controlling idea' and 'counter-idea' originated with him or not because McKee doesn’t cite his sources. What McKee seems to do is mash up a number of established theories, such as Vogler’s and Todorov’s as well as Egri’s. Even though I agree with this part of McKee’s theory, I disagree with so much of the rest of the book that I would hesitate to cite him as a major influence.
An Analysis of West Side Story
We can summarise West Side Story by utilising Syd Field’s theory of narrative structure. This film, a musical, begins by presenting a poor neighbourhood of New York in which two rival male gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, compete for territory and dominance. After the two gangs are warned by Lt. Schrank to stop fighting, the leader of the Jets, Riff, proposes to the other Jets that a ‘rumble’ should be set up between the two gangs to settle things once and for all. This is the inciting incident. Riff persuades his friend and co-founder of the Jets Tony (who has left the gang to pursue respectable employment at a drugstore) to go with him to a dance that evening at which he will arrange the rumble. At the dance, Tony meets Maria, a sister of the Sharks’ leader Bernado, and they fall in love. This marks plot point 1. Tony later that evening sees and declares his love for Maria while she stands on a balcony. At midnight, the Jets and Sharks meet at the drugstore; Tony appears and persuades both sides that the rumble should simply be a bare-knuckle fight between one member of each gang. The next afternoon Tony and Maria meet and imagine marrying. Maria finds out about the rumble and persuades Tony to try to stop it. That night Tony arrives at the scene of the rumble and attempts to prevent it; in the ensuing commotion Bernado kills Riff with a switchblade and then Tony kills Bernardo. This marks plot point 2 and is the climax of the story. In the aftermath, Tony visits Maria, they reconcile and consummate their marriage. They arrange to meet at a bus-stop to leave New York. Maria’s intended fiancé Chino is looking for Tony to kill him in revenge and so Tony takes refuge in the basement of the drug-store. Maria is detained by Lt. Schrank and sends her friend Anita to the drugstore to tell Tony this. At the drugstore, Anita is abused by Jets and so decides to lie to them, telling them that Chino has killed Maria. When Tony is informed of this, he takes to the streets distraught calling for Chino to come kill him. He sees Maria, they fall into each others’ arms briefly – and then Chino appears and shoots Tony. The film ends with Maria denouncing both gangs, saying that it is hate that has killed Tony.
West Side Story is an adaption of Romeo and Juliet – one similarity among many is that both are comedies until the climax of each and then both turn into tragedies. However, it is important to focus on the significant differences between the two stories. In Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets are more or less identical but, in West Side Story, the Sharks and the Jets represent two quite different social groups, both marginal. The Sharks are Puerto Rican immigrants; in the song “America”, the Puerto Rican girls sing of their desire to be part of America, to integrate into American society, while the boys sing of American racism against Puerto Ricans, rejecting American society and asserting the priority of their Puerto Rican identities. This is perhaps the most important song in the film. The Jets are presented more ambiguously. They are all American-born and sometimes seem to represent ‘mainstream’ American society (it is significant that Lt. Schrank, an establishment figure, is much more prejudiced against the Sharks than against the Jets). More often though, the Jets appear to embody another excluded grouping – juvenile delinquents. The song “Gee, Officer Krupke” that the Jets sing while waiting outside the drugstore for the Sharks to arrive parodically highlights the failure of various discourses (legal, psychological and sociological) to explain away the problem of juvenile delinquency and thus integrate juvenile delinquents into mainstream American society. The song implies that the Jets’ juvenile delinquency is a deliberate decision, another conscious rejection of mainstream American society.
With this said, we can assert that the antithesis presented in West Side Story is, “The different social groupings that make up America can be integrated through love” and the thesis is “It is impossible to integrate the diverse groups that make up America.” Neither the Jets nor the Sharks actually want to integrate. This societal focus is what most differentiates West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet. The thesis may seem pessimistic but perhaps the function of tragedies is to lance boils, present the worst possible outcome to provide audiences with a kind of catharsis.
If the thesis and antithesis point to an underlying unity in West Side Story, can this method of analysis also yield an underlying structure? A story, as Kurt Vonnegut argues, has a shape; ideally it is characterised by ever mounting conflict, tension or jeopardy. As West Side Story switches between its antithesis, the love story, and its thesis, the story of turf warfare between two gangs, it argues for each ever more strongly. After Tony is invited to the dance, he sings of a premonition that something good, something miraculous, is going to happen to him soon; Maria too, before the dance, says, “Tonight is the real beginning of my life as a young lady of America”. After meeting, their story is one of ever greater commitment to their forbidden love: for instance, a little after the half-way mark, they unofficially marry and in the last act they sleep together. Contrapuntally, the idea of irreconcilable differences between the Jets and Sharks is gradually intensified. At the beginning of the film, they could just be two rival gangs but, as the story develops, we realise that they have two entirely different ways of understanding their group identities. What Daniel and Gulino call ‘the dramatic question’, “Can love bring together the disparate groups that make up America?” is posed at plot point 1, when Tony and Maria first see each other, and is answered in the negative at plot point 2 when Tony kills Bernado. Although the dramatic question has been answered, arguably the jeopardy continues to build right up until the finish of the film.
It is significant that when during the third act Tony and Maria reconcile and plan to elope, they sing “Somewhere there’s a place for us” suggesting that, in reality, there is no place for them at all. Pessimistically, the film is arguing that the US is composed entirely of distinct irreconcilable ethnic groups and that the unifying transcendental concept “America” is a chimera.
West Side Story is a useful film to analyse because it shows up the limitations of some other narrative theories. Levi Strass, as I understand him, argues that stories are ahistorical and universal but the central idea in West Side Story, the need to integrate different social groups into a multicultural pluralistic society, is not something I imagine an issue among primitive pre-urban peoples. Likewise, it is extremely difficult to apply the template of the monomyth (associated with Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler) to West Side Story because West Side Story involves two protagonists, no quest and ends tragically. For a narrative theory to be satisfactory it should cover all successful stories, including West Side Story, not just a few. And seeing stories as exercises in persuasion is a helpful start.
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