The Anatomy of Story (35 page)

Bloom runs to the brothel and seeks out Stephen with intense determination. Bloom defends Stephen against the madam, Bella Cohen, who tries to take Stephen's money and demands far too much as payment for damage to the chandelier. Ironically, Bloom uses blackmail for his most moral act of the day: he threatens to reveal publicly that Bella has been using prostitution to send her son to Oxford.

■ Limited Self-Revelation and Moral Decision for Both Men
(Eumaeus)
Fitzharris coffeehouse.
The two men head over to a little coffeehouse. After his self-revelation at the brothel, Stephen knows what he must do with his future. He lends a man some money and tells him his teaching job will soon be available at the school.

At the coffeehouse, Bloom and Stephen enjoy a long conversation on many topics. But though they experience a moment of communion, they are ultimately too different to sustain a friendship beyond this night. Bloom is too practical, too much a philistine, for the extremely theoretical and artistic Stephen.

Now Bloom's drive shifts again, this time to whether he will be able to return to Molly, in the sense of marriage and home. Though he is afraid of Molly's wrath, he decides to bring Stephen with him,

saying, "Lean on me." One sign that Ulysses is more complex psychologically and morally than most stories is that Bloom's moral decision is not strictly altruistic. He thinks Stephen could help him write an ad. He also believes the young man will provide him with material for a story he wants to write, and he can benefit from Stephen's higher sensibilities.

Thematic Revelation
(Ithaca)
Bloom's kitchen and bedroom.
The new "father" and "son" share another communal moment, drinking cocoa in Bloom's kitchen, the same site where the "enslaved" Bloom fixed Molly's breakfast the previous morning. Stephen heads home, and Bloom goes to bed. Using a question-and-answer catechism technique to tell the story, Joyce begins the process of lifting
Ulysses
above these few characters to a cosmic perspective, a thematic revelation, just as he did at the end of his short story "The Dead." Though the two men have had a small but real communion, when Stephen leaves, Bloom feels the "cold of interstellar space."
Molly's Weakness and Need, Problem, Partial Self-Revelation, Moral Decision
(Penelope)
Bloom and Molly's bed.
In bed, Molly retells the story of
Ulysses
from her point of view, but her journey is completely in her mind. She expresses her deep loneliness and her feeling of being unloved by her husband. She is also well aware of her husband's many weaknesses and needs. In her marriage bed, with Bloom now sleeping beside her (though head to feet), she recalls her affair earlier that day with Blazes Boylan.

But finally Molly is the woman of "yes." The sense that Bloom and Molly's love may be reborn is found in her thought that this morning she will fix her husband breakfast and serve him eggs, and in her memory of Bloom when, deeply in love, she agreed to be his wife and fed him "seedcake." In this grand circular journey ending back home, there is the hint that a "remarriage" between Bloom and Molly might just occur.

C
reating the
S
tory
W
orld—
W
riting
E
xercise
5

■ Story World in One Line
Use the designing principle of your story to come up with a one-line description of the story world.

■ Overall Arena
Define the overall arena and how you will maintain a single arena throughout the story. Remember that there are four main ways to do this:

1. Create a large umbrella and then crosscut and condense.

2. Send the hero on a journey through generally the same area, but one that develops along a single line.

3. Send the hero on a circular journey through generally the same area.

4. Make the hero a fish out of water.

■ Value Oppositions and Visual Oppositions
Return to the character web of your story, and identify the value oppositions between your characters. Assign visual oppositions that complement or express these value oppositions.

■ Land, People, and Technology
Explain the unique combination of land, people, and technology that will make up the world of your story. For example, your story may take place in a lush wilderness inhabited only by small nomadic groups using the simplest of tools. Or it may play out in a modern city where nature has virtually disappeared and technology is highly advanced.

■ System
If your hero lives and works in a system (or systems), explain the rules and hierarchy of power, along with your hero's place in that hierarchy. If a larger system is enslaving your hero, explain why he is unable to see his own enslavement.

■ Natural Settings
Consider if any of the major natural settings-ocean, outer space, forest, jungle, desert, ice, island, mountain, plain, or river—are useful to your story world as a whole. Make sure you don't use any of them in a predictable or implausible way.

■ Weather
In what way might weather help you detail your story world? Focus on dramatic moments in the story—such as revelations and conflicts—when using special weather conditions. Again, avoid cliches.

■ Man-made Spaces
How do the various man-made spaces in which your characters live and work help you express the story structure?

■
Miniatures
Decide if you want to use a miniature. If you do, what is

it and what precisely does it represent?
■ Becoming Big or Small
Is it appropriate for a character to become big or small over the course of the story? How does it reveal the character or theme of your story?

■ Passageways
If a character moves from one subworld to a very different subworld, come up with a unique passageway.

■ Technology
Describe the crucial technology in your story, even if it involves only the most mundane and everyday tools.

■ Hero's Change or World Change
Look again at the overall change in your hero. Decide whether the world will change along with the hero or not and how.

■ Seasons
Is one or more of the seasons important to the story?
If so,
try to come up with a unique way to connect the seasons to the dramatic line.

■
Holiday or Ritual
If the philosophy of a holiday or ritual is central to your story, decide in what way you agree or disagree with that philosophy. Then connect the holiday or ritual at the appropriate story points.

■ 
Visual Seven Steps
Detail the visual subworlds that you will attach to the main structure steps in your story. Look especially at these structure steps:

1. weakness or need

2. desire

3. opponent

4. apparent defeat or temporary freedom

5. visit to death

6. battle

7. freedom or slavery

Figure out how to connect the major natural settings and man-made spaces to the subworlds you use. Concentrate on the following three subworlds:

1. Weakness subworld:
If your hero starts the story enslaved, explain how the initial subworld is an expression or accentuation of the hero's great weakness.

2. 
Opponent subworld:
Describe how the opponent's world

expresses his power and ability to attack the hero's great weakness.

3.
Battle subworld:
Try to come up with a place of battle that is the most confined space of the entire story.

As practice, let's break down the story world of one of the most popular stories ever written.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

(novel by J. K. Rowling, screenplay by Steven Kloves, 2001)

■ Story World in One Line
A school for wizards in a giant magical medieval castle.

■ Overall Arena
All of the Harry Potter stories combine myth, fairy tale, and the schoolboy-coming-of-age story (as in
Goodbye; Mr. Chips; Tom Brown's School Days;
and
Dead Poets Society).
So
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
uses the fantasy structure of beginning in the mundane world and then moving to the main arena, which is the fantasy world. That world and arena is the Hogwarts School, set in a castle surrounded by lush nature. The story plays out over the course of the school year in a large but defined place with seemingly infinite subworlds.

■ Value Oppositions and Visual Oppositions
The story has a number of value oppositions on which the visual oppositions are based.
1. Harry and the wizards of Hogwarts versus Muggles:
The first opposition is between wizards and Muggles. Muggles, who are average, nonmagical people, value possessions, money, comfort, sensual pleasure, and themselves above all. The wizards of Hogwarts School value loyalty, courage, self-sacrifice, and learning.

Visually, Muggles live in average suburban houses on average suburban streets, where everything is homogenized to look the same, where there is no magic and no community, and nature has been so tamed that it's almost gone.

The Hogwarts' world is a magical kingdom unto itself, a huge castle surrounded by wild nature, a school that teaches not only magic but also the values on which the school was founded.

2. Ha
rry versus Lord Voldemort:
The main opposition is between good wizard Harry and evil wizard Voldemort". Where Harry values friendship, courage, achievement, and fairness, Voldemort believes only in power and will do anything, including committing murder, to get it. Harry's visual world is the "shining city on the hill," the community of scholars at Hogwarts. Voldemort's world is the Dark Forest that surrounds the school and the dark underworld below the school where his power is strongest.

3. 
Harry versus Draco Malfoy.
The third major opposition is student to student. Young Draco Malfoy is aristocratic and disdainful of the poor. He values status and winning at all costs. Draco is set in visual opposition to Harry, Ron, and Hermione by being placed in a competing house, Slytherin, with its own flags and colors.

■ Land, People, and Technology
The story is set in the present, but it is really a throwback to an earlier societal stage with a very different combination of land, people, and technology than the audience expects. This is a modern-day prep school set in a medieval world ol castles, lakes, and forests. The technology is another hybrid: magic with a high-tech sheen, where the latest witch's broom is the Nimbus 2000 and the techniques of magic are taught with all the depth and rigor of a modern-day university.

■ Systems
The Harry Potter stories fuse two systems: the prep school and the world of magic. This fusion is the gold of the story idea (and worth billions of dollars). Writer J. K. Rowling has taken great pains to detail the rules and workings of this hybrid system. The headmaster and head wizard is Professor Dumbledore. Teachers such as Professor McGonagall and Professor Snape teach courses in potions, defense against the dark arts, and herbology. Students are divided into four houses: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw. The wizard world even has its own sport, Quidditch, with as precise a set of rules as any sport in the "real" world.

As a first-year student who is only eleven, Harry is at the bottom of the hierarchy in this world. His great potential suggests he will rise to the top over the course of the seven stories and seven years. But for now he represents the audience, and they learn how this magical system works at the same time he does.

■ 
Natural Settings
Hogwarts castle is built beside a mountain lake and is surrounded by the Dark Forest.

■ Weather
Weather is used to some dramatic effect but in a fairly predictable way. It is raining heavily when Hagrid arrives at the hut where Harry's foster family has hidden. There is lightning on Halloween when the troll attacks the school. And it is snowing at Christmas.

■ Man-made Spaces
Rowling makes full use of the techniques of man-made spaces in storytelling. She sets up the magic world by first showing the mundane. For his first eleven years, Harry lives enslaved in a bland suburban house on a bland suburban street. After learning he is a wizard, Harry in effect goes back in time when he and Hagrid go shopping on the nineteenth-century Dickensian street of Diagon Alley. The street is still recognizably English, but its quaint shops and swirl of community make it an exciting halfway house on the journey to the magical medieval kingdom of Hogwarts School. Along with Ollivander's Wand Shop is Gringott's Bank, whose goblin clerks and cavernous vaults suggest a Dickensian Hall of the Mountain King. Harry then takes a nineteenth-century locomotive, the Hogwarts Express, deep into the fairy-tale world of Hogwarts.