JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #31
December 17, 2020
Number 30, in which I take a bit of license.
This may be a bit of an abstruse rumination, but inasmuch as my ruminations are based on whatever’s on my mind, I do want now to think briefly about a particular connection between the craft of fiction and politics that has captured my attention. Before you run as far as you can from this post, maybe I can coax you back by noting that I mean to talk about Plato, Aristotle, and the Enlightenment, not the local, contemporary politics of 2020 in the USA--then again, maybe that’s not much of an invitation either. I also want to avoid doing any actual research for this essay and will pull from memory instead, so forgive my elisions and mistakes. I’m just musing on a basic idea.
Plato’s Republic set the well-being of the city-state as arbiter of the disposition of its citizens. So it was that the interests of citizens were subsumed by the interests of the city-state, and maintenance of the city-state took precedence. Millennia later, Bertrand Russell noted that when Thrasymachus argued against Plato’s arrangement in an early chapter of the Republic, Plato gave the literary Socrates a rather poor counter-argument that failed to settle the matter of whether or not the individual or the city-state should be given the position of precedence, and so the history of thought has never had a clear answer to this question. Karl Popper, in the early Twentieth Century, after the individualistic turn of the Enlightenment, wrote that Plato’s arrangement was always a form of totalitarianism.
Meanwhile, Aristotle, whose Politics propounded a similar concern for the city-state precedent to the citizen,* additionally wrote in his Poetics that Plot has the superior position over Character. Recently I have found myself considering whether there is a connection between how we consider the role of a citizen within the state to how we think about the role of a character in a plot.
Aristotle’s philosophy dominated the educated Western World for about two millennia until the Enlightenment. In the Sixteenth Century, Martin Luther’s theses attacked the dominance of the Catholic Church as the arbiter of a person’s relationship with God, and the subsequent Reformation and gradual empowerment of the individual opened the way for the eventual up-ending of the political order in Europe. As ordinary people were given to have their own personal relationships with God, likewise, political philosophy began to increasingly understand citizens to have precedence in determining their own political circumstances. This led to the rise of the Western democracies and an inversion of Plato’s answer to Thrasymachus, which gave Popper his critique: the well-being of the citizen now takes precedence over the well-being of the state.
At the same time, our fiction began to invert its concerns of plot and character. Following the same trajectory as political philosophy, fictive craft moved to give character the superior position in its dichotomy with plot. Today, our concern is always character first, and almost any advice you will find on how to craft a story will insist that plot must emerge out of the concerns of the character.
While these intellectual shifts in the history of Western thought seem to correlate, I wonder if there is a causative connection between them. I also wonder if there is an argument that could put to rest at last the question of whether the citizen or the state has ultimate precedence, which may also at last determine how character and plot should be considered--or if both are fundamentally unresolvable, merely a matter of choice. Unfortunately, I don’t actually have an answer. I think this is an open question that may (but probably doesn’t) deserve at least a bit of rumination.
In any case, there it is, my rumination for today. Maybe next week I’ll return to something less esoteric.
* - ugh this is such an egregious simplification: Aristotle’s and Plato’s purposes were so very different.