JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #77
November 11, 2021
When thinking about story structure and reader interest, I often return to the concept of profluence, a term and idea I got from John Gardner. In The Art of Fiction, he writes, "By definition--and of aesthetic necessity--a story contains profluence, a requirement best satisfied by a sequence of causally related events, a sequence that can end in only one of two ways: in resolution, when no further event can take place..., or in logical exhaustion, our recognition that we’ve reached the stage of infinite repetition; more events might follow..., but they will all express the same thing" (p. 53). Today I’d like to offer a few comments on this idea.
Elsewhere, Gardner explains that by "aesthetic necessity" he means that because a story is necessarily extended through time, there must be some sense of progress that keeps our interest. We can see this requirement when we notice that flash fiction does not rely so much on plot as does a novel. It might be the case that profluence is a necessary condition for a sequence of events to qualify as a plot. The cause-and-effect connection between events (generally provided by the character’s agency) may not be enough if those events are not also progressive, in the sense of having forward movement. I think quite a bit of advice on novel-structure can be reduced to this maxim.
In a similar way, we can perhaps consider these two possible end-states for the sequence of events as suggestive of what’s necessary for a profluent story. I already mentioned how cause-and-effect connections might be offered by a character (in the characteristic way a person reacts to something and hence chooses to pursue further activity: The rain spoiled Jake’s lunch, so he punched the cop); but likewise I think the idea of resolution may rely on the interventions of a character. One damn thing can happen after another, but it only matters when people are involved. Events alone can’t really be resolved, but human problems seek after resolution, which casts the illumination of purpose backward through time to enlighten such choices and consequent events that brought it about, casting them in a spotlight of meaning. Even "logical exhaustion," whereby a character’s problem finds no resolution, serves as the source of meaning for such events that brought it about.
I think what I’m confirming through this rumination is a general sense I’ve had for a long time (and expressed elsewhere) that plot and character are inextricably linked. You can’t have one without the other, and even an idea like John Gardner’s profluence carries the baggage of character along with it into plot. So, whenever we have an idea for a story, we should make sure the idea is comprised of both a series of events and a character for whom those events matter.