The Anatomy of Story (27 page)

The river as the place of physical, moral, and emotional passage is found in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Deliverance; Heart of Darkness
and its adaptation,
Apocalypse Now; A River Runs Through It;
and
The African Queen.

A note of caution: beware of visual cliches. It's easy to fall into the trap of using natural settings in a formulaic way. "My hero is getting a big revelation? I'll send him to the mountaintop." Make sure any natural setting you use is fundamental to the story. And above all, use it in an original way.

Weather

Weather, like natural settings, can provide a powerful physical representation of the inner experience of the character or evoke strong feelings in the audience. Here are the classic correlations between weather and emotion:

■ Lightning and thunder: Passion, terror, death

■ Rain: Sadness, loneliness, boredom, coziness

■ Wind: Destruction, desolation

■ Fog: Obfuscation, mystery

■ Sun: Happiness, fun, freedom, but also corruption hidden below a pleasant exterior

■ Snow: Sleep, serenity, quiet inexorable death

Again, avoid simply repeating these classic correlations and instead try to use weather in surprising and ironic ways.

Man-made Spaces

Man-made spaces are even more valuable to you as a writer than natural settings, because they solve one of the most difficult problems a writer faces: How do you express a society? All man-made spaces in stories are a form of condenser-expander. Each is a physical expression, in microcosm, of the hero and the society in which he lives.

The problem for the writer is to express that society on paper in such a way that the audience can understand the deepest relationship between the hero and other people. The following are some of the major man-made spaces that can help you do that.

The House

For the storyteller, man-made spaces begin with the house. The house is a person's first enclosure. Its unique physical elements shape the growth of the person's mind and the mind's well-being in the present. The house is also the home of the family, which is the central unit of social life and the central unit of drama. So all fiction writers must strongly consider what place a house may play in their story.

The house is unsurpassed as a place of intimacy, for your characters and your audience. But it is filled with visual oppositions that you must know in order to express the house to its fullest dramatic potential.

Safety Versus Adventure

The house is, first and foremost, the great protector. "In every dwelling, even the richest, the first task ... is to find the original shell."
⁴
Put another way, "Always in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle... . Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house."
⁵

The house may begin as the shell, cradle, or nest of the human being. But that protective cocoon is also what makes its opposite possible: the house is the strong foundation from which we go out and take on the world. "[The] house breathes. First it is a coat of armor, then it extends
ad infinitum,
which amounts to saying that we live in it in alternate security and adventure. It is both cell and world."
⁶
Often in stories, the first step of adventure, the longing for it, happens at the window. A character looks out through the eyes of the house, maybe even hears a train whistle calling, and dreams of going.

Ground Versus Sky

A second opposition embedded in the house is that between ground and sky. The house has deep roots. It hunkers down. It tells the world and its inhabitants that it is solid and can be trusted.

But a house also extends skyward. Like a tiny but proud cathedral, it wishes to generate the "highest" and the best in its inhabitants. "All strongly terrestrial beings and a house is strongly terrestrial- are nevertheless subject to the attractions of an aerial, celestial world. The well-rooted house likes to have a branch that is sensitive to the wind, or an attic that can hear the rustle of leaves."
⁷

The Warm House

The warm house in storytelling is big (though usually not a mansion), with enough rooms, corners, and cubbyholes for each inhabitant's uniqueness to thrive. Notice that the warm house has within it two additional opposing elements: the safety and coziness of the shell and the diversity that is only possible within the large.

Writers often intensify the warmth of the big, diverse house by using the technique known as the "buzzing household." This is the Pieter Brueghel technique (especially in paintings like
The Hunters in the Snow
and
Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap)
applied to the house. In the buzzing household, all the different individuals of an extended family are busy in their own pocket of activity. Individuals and small groups may combine for a special moment and then go on their merry way. This is the perfect community at the level of the household. Each person is both an individual and part of a nurturing family, and even when everyone is in different parts of the house, the audience can sense a gentle spirit that connects them.

The big, diverse house and the buzzing household are found in such stories as
You Can't Take It with You, Meet Me in St. Louis, Life with Father, The Cider House Rules, Pride and Prejudice, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Royal Tenenbaums, Steel Magnolias, It's a Wonderful Life,
TV's
Waltons, David Copper-field, How Green Was My Valley, Mary Poppins,
and
Yellow Submarine.

Part of the power of the warm house is that it appeals to the audience's sense of their own childhood, either real or imagined. Everyone's house was big and cozy when they were very young, and if they soon discovered that they lived in a hovel, they can still look at the big, warm house and see what they wished their childhood had been. That's why the warm house is so often used in connection with memory stories, like Jean Shepherd's
Christmas Story,
and why American storytellers so often use ramshackle Victorian places, with their many snug gables and corners from a bygone era.

The bar is a version of the house in storytelling, and it too can be warm
or
terrifying. In the television show
Cheers,
the bar is a utopia, a
community where "everybody knows your name." The regulars are always in the same spot, always making the same mistakes, and always in the same quirky relation to one another. This bar is also a warm place because nobody
has
to change.

Casablanca

(play
Everybody Comes to Rick's
by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison,

screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, 1942)
The story world is as important to the success of
Casablanca
as it is to the most advanced fantasy, myth, or science fiction story. And it is all focused on the bar, Rick's Cafe Americain.

What makes the bar in
Casablanca
unique as a story world, and incredibly powerful for the audience, is that it is both a dystopia and a Utopia. This bar is where the king of the underworld makes his home.

Rick's Cafe Americain is a dystopia because everyone wants to escape Casablanca, and this is where they pass the time, waiting, waiting, always waiting to get out. There is no exit here. It is also a dystopia because it is all about money grubbing and bribery, a perfect expression of the hero's cynicism, selfishness, and despair.

But this bar is at the same time a fabulous Utopia. Rick is the master here, the king in his lair, and all of his courtiers pay their respects. The cafe is a big, warm house with lots of nooks and corners and all sorts of characters to fill them. Each character not only knows his place but also enjoys it. There's Carl the waiter and Sascha the bartender; Abdul the bouncer; Emil, who manages the casino; and Rick's sidekick, Sam, master of song. Over in that booth is Berger, the nerdy Norwegian underground fighter, just waiting to follow Laszlo's command. There's even the perfect hiding place for the letters of transit, under the lid of Sam's piano.

In a land of contradictions, this warm house is the home of cool, the origin of hip, embodied in King Rick, impeccably dressed in his white tuxedo jacket, a man who is always suave and witty, even under threat from Nazi killers. But this is a world that lives at night, and the king is dark and brooding too. He refers to two murdered couriers as the "honored dead." This king is Hades.

By creating a sealed world that is both dystopia and
Utopia,
the writ-ers of
Casablanca
in effect create a Mobius strip story world that never stops. Forever in time, Rick's Cafe Americain is open every night. Refugees still gather there; the captain still gambles and enjoys the women; the Germans still make their arrogant appearance. It is one of those timeless places that make great stories, and it continues to exist because it is a cozy lair where everyone enjoys their role.

Far from being the place where everyone wants an exit visa, Rick's bar in far-off Casablanca is the perfect community where no one in the audience ever wants to leave.

The Terrifying House

Opposite the warm house, the terrifying house is usually a house that has gone over the line from cocoon to prison. In the best stories of this kind, the house is terrifying because it is an outgrowth of the great weakness and need of the character. This house is the hero's biggest fear made manifest. In the extreme, the character's mind has rotted in some way, and the house too is in ruins. But it is no less powerful a prison.

In
Great Expectations
, Miss Havisham is a slave in her own run-down mansion because she has chosen to martyr herself on the altar of unrequited love. Her mind has grown sick with bitterness; her house is a perfect picture of her mind. In
Wuthering Heights,
the house is a horrible prison because Cathy gave up true love there and because Heathcliff's bitterness has made him commit awful acts against its inhabitants in her name.

Horror stories place such strong emphasis on the haunted house that it is one of the unique story beats of the form. Structurally, the terrifying or haunted house represents the power the past holds over the present. The house itself becomes a weapon of revenge for the sins committed by the fathers and mothers. In such stories, the house doesn't have to be a decrepit, creaking mansion with slamming doors, moving walls, and secret, dark passageways. It can be the simple, suburban houses of
Poltergeist
and
A Nightmare on Elm Street
or the grand hotel on the mountaintop in
The Shining.
On this mountaintop, the seclusion and the hotel's past sins don't lead the hero to think great thoughts; they drive him mad.

When the terrifying house is a grand Gothic hulk, an aristocratic family often inhabits it. The inhabitants have lived off the work of others, who typically dwell in the valley below, simply because of their birth. The house is either too empty lor its size, which implies that there is no life in the structure, or it is stuffed with expensive but out-of-date furnishings that oppress by their sheer numbers. In these stories, the house feeds on its parasitic inhabitants just as they feed on others. Eventually, the family falls and, when the story is taken to the extreme, the house burns, devours them, or collapses on them. Examples are "The Fall of the House of Usher" and other stories by Poe,
Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Dracula, The Innocents, The Amityville Horror, Sunset Boulevard, Frankenstein, Long Day's Journey into Night,
and stories by Chekhov and Strindberg.

In more modern stories, the terrifying house is a prison because it is not big and diverse. It is small and cramped, with thin walls or no walls at all. The family is jammed in, so there is no community, no separate, cozy corners where each person has the space to become who he uniquely should be. In these houses, the family, as the basic unit of drama, is the unit of never-ending conflict. The house is terrifying because it is a pressure cooker, and with no escape for its members, the pressure cooker explodes. Examples are
Death of a Salesman, American Beauty, A Streetcar Named Desire, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Glass Menagerie, Carrie, Psycho,
and
The Sixth Sense.

Cellar Versus Attic

Inside the house, the central opposition is between cellar and attic. The cellar is underground. It is the graveyard of the house, where the dead bodies, the dark past, and the terrible family secrets are buried. But they are not buried there for long. They are waiting to come back, and when they finally do make it back to the living room or the bedroom, they usually destroy the family. The skeletons in the basement can be shocking, as in
Psycho,
or darkly funny, as in
Arsenic and Old Lace.