The
other day in class, after going over your Short Story assignment, I briefly introduced a useful pair of concepts drawn from Russian Formalist
criticism, which revolutionized how literary scholars conceived and talked
about narrative in the early half of the twentieth century: fabula and sjuzet. These are often loosely translated into English as “story”
and “plot”—terms which are so close in meaning that the distinction nearly gets lost. I will attempt a more detailed and hopefully clearer summary here;
you may consult Wikipedia for a more complete account.
“Fabula”
(or “story”) refers to the sequence of events, actions, spoken words, and
circumstances that comprise the “raw material” of a story—the “stuff that
happened” apart from any narrative representation of these events. We imagine a
“God’s-eye” view of the world that could reconstruct every significant feature of an event
without altering or distorting it in any way. The fabula, however, turns out to
be a theoretical construction: no such account, of any event, exists. Once something happens, it immediately slips into the past, and our
only way of accessing it takes the form of narrative—whether a memory, an
anecdote, a diary entry, a police report, court testimony, journalism, or
historical writing, we have no access to “events themselves” apart from some
form of narrative. We can never access the “real story,” and any narrative, theoretically, is an approximation.
The
“sjuzet” (or “plot”) represents the artificial linguistic construction that
seeks to represent the story in words: an author shapes and interprets the “events
themselves” in all kinds of ways when he or she builds a narrative from
experience. (And even fictional writing not based on direct experience posits or imagines a fabula that must be given written form.) An author plots or
arranges that raw material according to linguistic and cultural conventions of
narrative. A well-told story might create a strong impression of accuracy, reliability,
of access to the “events themselves”—in fiction, we call this “realism.” But a
relentlessly “realistic” rendering of a narrative (without a lot of personal,
editorial commentary or obvious speculation; employing the “omniscient”
third-person voice—think of Hemingway's style in “Hills Like White Elephants”) is still as much of an artificial construction as a more
obviously “fictionalized” account. In either case, we have nothing but the
narrative to go on, no finally “real” version of the story against which to gauge its accuracy. Evidence can bolster an account of events, and we might reasonably gauge the accuracy of a narrative in all kinds of ways, when
it really matters (as in courtroom testimony, where a sjuzet always is subject
to critical scrutiny and burdens of proof). But even the most scrupulously “objective,” fact-based narrative is, fundamentally, a linguistic construction.
Does
this distinction make sense? Does it seem obvious? The important
insight to grasp, I think, has to do with the constructed nature of any narrative. The fabula does not exist, except in so far as it has been given shape
in a sjuzet. We can’t conveniently step outside of language and access “the
events themselves”; once they’ve occurred, “events” only take shape as part of a narrative (or else they are forgotten and disappear). We are indeed “trapped in
language,” with no access to some extralinguistic reality, as some of the poststructuralist followers of the Russian
Formalists might have put it.
The
study of fiction—and especially short fiction, which has to do more in a
compact space—repeatedly bumps us up against these limitations of language. We
are only reading sjuzets in this
course. For some of these narratives, there may indeed have
been “real” people, settings, and a sequence of events on which they are based—but
that doesn’t matter much to us as readers of a short story. I don’t see this “limitation”
as a cause for despair, and I don’t feel especially “trapped in language.” But
it does mean that we have to accustom ourselves to ambiguity, to the fact that
short stories often end without clear resolution—questions remain, and continue
to point us outside the apparent bounds of what the author has chosen to
include. We have these wonderfully rich and ambiguous stories to work with, and
while they prompt us to imaginatively reconstruct a hypothetical fabula as we read (they seem to point toward an external reality where
certain things happened at a certain time to certain people), we do not despair
(usually) of never getting access to “the real story.” There is no real story, apart from the
constructed, written narrative.
Some
writers will try to relentlessly hide the constructed nature of their
narratives, to create the illusion of unfiltered reality being presented
directly to the reader. But Tim O’Brien constantly draws attention
to the constructedness of his stories, the theoretical fabula-sjuzet divide, from the very start of this book (its
dedication page, its epigraph, and its explicit identification as “a work of
fiction” on the title page), O’Brien compels us to recognize both that we are
reading an account of real stuff that happened to real people in a real war (we take these stories as
a reflection of actual wartime
experience, written by an eyewitness and participant), and that he, as the
author, is constantly shaping, reshaping, altering, and adding to that real
stuff (“making stuff up” in order to produce short stories, or works of fiction). Even when his fictions use a character’s “real name” (as
far as we know), or refer to the author/narrator himself as “Tim O’Brien,” we are still
fully aware that the events (often controversial and morally ambiguous) cannot
be accessed outside of the stories we are reading. To call these “fiction” is
not to say that they are phony, imagined, or false—indeed, O’Brien is adamant
that “truth” can be achieved through
fiction, even especially through the invention and alteration of the factual bases for a
story.
Think
of how often the “same” stories appear in various forms throughout this collection.
Near the end of “Spin,” early in the book, we get the following brief
exchange between Kiowa and a silent “Tim”:
A red clay trail outside
the village of My Khe.
A hand grenade.
A slim, dead, dainty
young man of about twenty.
Kiowa
saying, “No choice, Tim. What else could you do?”
Kiowa saying, “Right?”
Kiowa saying, “Talk to
me.” (36)
And
yet “Tim” doesn’t “talk” here—not yet. We might be
able to surmise something about the situation, but we have not yet heard “the
story.” We “get” this passage much more clearly on a second reading. Not until “The
Man I Killed” do we get further elaboration of this earlier sketch (with the
repetition of key phrases, like the “dainty” qualities of the dead man), but at
this point, the focus is primarily on the moments just after the man has been
killed, as the narrator (“Tim”) tries to deal with the horror of what he’s
done. And then, in the next story (“Ambush”), he finally recounts the act of
killing itself (in an imagined response to his daughter’s question about
whether he killed anyone in the war). It takes “Tim O’Brien” multiple attempts
to “talk”—to turn this set of actions and events into a “story”—and indeed the
book almost seems to avoid certain
subjects at first, as if the author would really rather not get into some of
these stories. And yet he comments that the effort it takes to confront this
stuff is largely “why [he] keep[s] writing war stories” (125). The same set of
now-familiar elements are revisited yet again in “Good Form,” even as this short
fragment calls the now-established “facts” of the story into question (“twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough” [171]). The book
continually circles around stories it wants to tell, as if wondering how to
tell them.
The
“story” of the man he killed (or didn’t) is “told” in various forms—often repeating key
images and motifs—throughout this book, and the same is true of other stories
(Kiowa’s gruesome demise, for example). This is a book that is centrally about
people trying to make sense of their experience, to turn the chaos and
absurdity of war into a coherent and meaningful narrative. But O’Brien continually reminds us that this is an artificial and subjective process. The “real
story” continues to exist in a theoretical plain outside narrative. We know “stuff
happened,” and these arrangements of words are an effort to make that stuff
real, to allow it to be communicated to someone else, to approximate the lived experience, “how it felt.”
While
a more straightforward, chronological account of the shooting of the young man
with the dainty wrists in one conventional narrative might seem like a more
effective way to create the illusion of reality (more of a direct reflection of how things actually happened), in fact, this odd “circling
around” of the story generates a unique confidence in the truth of
what is being conveyed: with each attempt
to tell the story, our conviction that there is a story to tell (that something
happened, and that it very much matters to the person telling it) is strengthened.
So,
as readers of short fiction this semester, we will continually attend to the creative choices
an author has made to shape his or her sjuzet:
the narrative point of view, the structure, the chronological sequence, the
beginning and end. As writers
of short fiction yourselves, who are basing your work at least in part on real
stuff, you will be thinking about fabula
and sjuzet all the time, whether you
use these arcane Russian words or not. There are infinite ways to shape your
story, and as the author, you need to make a number of consequential decisions
about how that theoretical set of events and actions will be constructed in narrative form.
