Final Fridays by John Barth Page B

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    LET US RETURN to the country of Things That Go Without Saying. One Q that I’ve never had a chance to A in these public circumstances is the perhaps most basic and apparently elementary of all—which is why I used frequently to put it to my coachees (especially the most advanced apprentice writers among them) and why I put it still to myself, most often in the well-filling interval between books: What is fiction? What’s a story ?
    Okay, so that’s two questions, really, and for the long replies thereto I refer anyone who’s interested to an essay of mine called “It Goes Without Saying,” in the collection Further Fridays 12 —one of those dizygotic twin volumes afore-referred-to. The short answer to the question “What’s a story?” was provided me by some member of yet another audience past, who after the show pressed upon me a treatise on something called Systems Philosophy and urged me to read it on the flight home. As I had no idea what Systems Philosophy might be, I did indeed leaf through that gift-book up there in the stratosphere, and although I landed not much wiser as to its subject, it did provide me with some wonderful jargon, out of which I constructed the following rigorous definition of the term story : A story
(it goes without saying) consists of the incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a complexified equilibrium.
    I confess to being in love with that definition 13 —which in fact quite accurately describes classic Aristotelian dramaturgy. The “unstable homeostatic system” is what I’ve called elsewhere the Ground Situation of any story: a dramaturgically voltaged state of affairs pre-existing the story’s present action, like the ongoing feud between the Capulets and the Montagues. Its “incremental perturbation” is the “rising action” or complications of the conflict following upon the introduction of a Dramatic Vehicle into the Ground Situation (Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet fall into star-crossed love, a turn of events that precipitates Bandello’s tale and Shakespeare’s play out of the Ground Situation; the couple’s incrementally more desperate attempts to consummate that love comprise the story’s action). The “catastrophic restoration” is the climax or Aristotelian peripateia , catastrophic in its relative swiftness and magnitude even in the quietest of stories. And the “complexified equilibrium” thereby restored is the classic denouement, dramaturgically consequential vis-à-vis the original Ground Situation or else no story has been told or sung or written down or played out (the lovers’ death, e.g., puts the interfamily squabble at least temporarily on Hold).
    All that sort of thing really does go without saying for most storytellers, who work at least as much by the hunch and feel of experienced talent as by articulated theory, and who are likely to find it easier to make up a story than to explain the difference between stories and non-stories or not-quite stories. If such high-tech theorizing makes no more sense to you than, say, much of life does, then I offer you another pet maxim from my inventory, to wit: Of of what
one can’t make sense, one may make art. May I repeat those eleven quasi-stammering monosyllables? Of of what one can’t make sense, one may make art.
    O self-demonstrating bliss.
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    BUT WHY does one make art? Specifically, what accounts for the odd circumstance that people in every time and place appear to enjoy, whether as individuals or as cultures, making up non-factual yarns, for example, and telling or writing or acting them out and hearing or reading or spectating them? Why is it that we Homo sapiens pleasure in the incremental perturbation of imaginary unstable homeostatic systems and their catastrophic restoration to complexified