The other day, my friend Jeremy said that he likes to lecture on writing concepts way over his students’ heads, or at least ostensibly, so that by the time the class has discussed and analyzed the concept for an hour or two, the students are still at a much more sophisticated place, even if they don’t understand the concept in its entirety.
I had struggled to find an umbrella to discuss structure in my students’ personal essays. I wanted to discuss Phillip Lopate’s “Portrait of My Body,” as an example of an author who proscribes him- or herself an exercise, and through that exercise, comes to new knowledge. To my mind, Lopate must have proscribed himself the project of describing each of his body parts in depth, and he discovers his personality and problems of perception along the way. Robert Olen Butler’s another one who writes to formal projects, and I might supplement Lopate with Butler in the future. I also wanted to discuss Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” for her expert use of white space and cross cuts. I also had the right craft reading for this discussion: Robert Root’s essay “Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment” from The Nonfictionist’s Guide. But I wanted a concept that could envelop and unify these discussions on structure.
Jeremy mentioned a new concept for me: fabula and syuzhet, from the Russian Formalists. The fabula is events as the actually happen, objectively, omnisciently, chronologically. The syuzhet is events as they’re told. Not only the chronology of the story, but the tense and point-of-view, where it’s cut to begin and end, what’s edited out, what’s emphasized, any manipulation. I lectured for a minute on objectivity and subjectivity, making the claim that fabula is, by definition, objective, while syuzhet is a presentation of the author and characters’ subjectivity.
It took an hour or so for my students to come to a common understanding. I used the movie Memento as an example. We watched a scene, then I summarized the fabula: a man’s wife is murdered, he loses his memory, he searches for the killer, he kills the killer. Then I summarized the syuzhet–that the movie is in reverse chronology, beginning with the protagonist murdering the wife’s killer. But that the movie is presented in fifteen-minute chronological episodes, so that after we see the wife’s killer has been shot, we jump to fifteen minutes’ beforehand, working our way to the gunshot. Memento is a complex syuzhet to grasp, and to my horror, only one or two students had seen the movie. So I compliment Memento with a very conventional syuzhet, an episode of House or any other medical drama. No matter how much the fabula would vary between diseases and diagnoses, some cases taking months, some taking days to play out, the fabula always fits into this syuzhet: scene of a person becoming dramatically sick, opening credits, thirty minutes of failed diagnoses…and they always guess lupus…, then the lightbulb moment five minutes before the show ends, when a team member jolts House’s genius into action. Finally, usually, a full recovery, then closing credits. We analyze how convention is a ready-made syuzhet.
Then I ask them to split into small groups and come up with examples of interesting syuzhets from films, TV shows, or texts. Lots of interesting examples came out in my recent class discussion. They hit upon flashback immediately. They also hit upon movies like Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, and A Beautiful Mind that privilege the protagonist’s unique subjectivity over the “reality” that everyone else in the movie experiences. We discussed ensemble casts in Game of Thrones and Crash that have to present events consecutively that, in the fabula, occur simultaneously. We discussed movies about murder investigations, how old-fashioned whodunnit murder mysteries create suspense by moving toward a “big reveal” in the end, when the murderer confesses. More contemporary murder movies reveal the murderer much earlier in the plot, emphasizing instead the murderer’s complex psychology, as in Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon. Murder investigation movies differ in syuzhet, while murder investigations all have similar fabula, at least in terms of chronology. My students discussed more and more complex examples, movies like Pulp Fiction, The Butterfly Effect, and Inception.
My lecture on fabula and syuzhet came in handy a week later, during my lesson plan on immediacy and distance. To get the conversation going on Amy Bauer’s “The Oil Man” and Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” I asked them to brainstorm different mediators in both pieces, defining mediation as “intervention in a process or relationship.” I further explained mediation by drawing an analogy to a road divided by a median. Mediation is the media in the road between the fabula and the syuzhet. Mediation manipulates events as they happen into events as they’re told. The brainstorm was a great success. My students hit on more obvious mediators like the author, the narrator, formal elements like point-of-view and tense, but also more abstract mediators like memory, pride, interpretation, imagination or a fantasy life, political or ethical bias. Once they understood mediation, we moved seamlessly into a discussion of memory, how to handle writing about events you don’t remember with perfect clarity, and a discussion about how much creative nonfiction writers can get away with manipulating.
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