Part II
Since we know by now “with what” the picture tells a story, we can proceed to investigate “in what manner” it must be told. This “manner” is the dramatic construction.
It would be wrong to assume that only the drama requires a dramatic construction. The word “drama” is taken from the Greek word dran, which means merely “action.” Consequently, any form of art which tells a story requires some kind of dramatic construction, be it a comedy or an adventure story, a drama or a psychological tragedy, an opera or a ballet, a painting or a pantomime, a symphony or a poem, a short story or a stage play.
Stories are in the minds of many people, and they may be good stories, based on personal experiences. But most of these people lack the conscious or unconscious knowledge of the manner in which such stories have to be told. The vivid impression of an event, or the impact of an experience, or even the honesty and sincerity of the storyteller are not sufficient to enable him to report the story. Attorneys, judges, doctors know how difficult it is to extract the facts of a happening even from a person who has no intention of hiding anything. To the contrary, in spite of the greatest desire to tell everything about a case or a sickness, a person may be unable to make the story understandable because of a lack of “dramatic construction.”
All of us know instances where a joke, told to one group of people, causes a burst of laughter, and on another occasion, the very same joke told by another person produces embarrassed silence. Yet it is the same joke; the difference between making people laugh and leaving them bored lies in the way this joke is told — it lies in the construction.
The very same story in a treatment by two different writers can be intensely interesting in one case and flat and boring in the other. Yet if we were to summarize the actual happenings and characters of both stories, we might find that they are identical. The difference lies in the respective qualities of their dramatic construction.
At this point, we must define the difference between the story and the dramatic construction. The story is the actual happening. The dramatic construction is the way in which this happening is told. The story is as varied and rich as life and the world. The dramatic construction consists of a limited number of rules which are applied in order to get certain effects. The story springs from the imagination of the author; the dramatic construction results from his technique. The story is the creation; the dramatic construction is the form into which this creation must be poured.
Sometimes the two are confused. It is thought that a story can be dissected scientifically in accordance with certain rules. This is impossible: the story is the free, unchained, and imponderable outgrowth of the creative mind. But the dramatic construction can be defined almost mathematically. Its laws can be applied to a variety of stories. If, however, we were trying to find rules for the story, we would have to create as many different laws as there are different stories, that is, millions. But the basic principles of the dramatic construction are few.
Some people believe that the dramatic construction is the important thing; but a clever dramatic construction without a good story is like an empty shell. Others despise the dramatic construction as something artificial and think that the story alone is important. But the story without dramatic construction is chaotic. It is like a world before God created order, and because of its chaotic state the story misses its primary purpose, which is to be understood by the person who is listening to it.
However, dramatic construction is not identical with plot. In Aristotle’s definition, plot is the organization of the incidents of the story. But dramatic construction, reaching beyond this limited function, embraces a larger field. It adapts the facts of the story to the form in which they have to be expressed, arranging them in such manner as to achieve the best possible effect upon the mind of the spectator. Thus dramatic construction is actually dependent upon and conditioned by three factors: the form, the happenings of the story (identical with reality), and the peculiarities of the spectator’s mind.
Of these factors we have so far only investigated the first one: the form. It is sometimes assumed erroneously that the dramatic construction pertains merely to the organization of the incidents of the story. But since each form of art has different physical characteristics, which bring the incidents in a different relation to themselves, a specific dramatic construction is necessitated for every form of storytelling. To prove this, we could take one story and tell it in the different forms of art. Try, for instance, to tell the story of Scheherazade in the following arts: painting, symphonic tone poem, novel, stage play, opera, ballet, motion picture. It is evident that the story would have to be constructed differently, in each case, even though we might leave the facts unchanged.
First to point out this interesting phenomenon was Ephraim Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781), a German critic and dramatist, in his eighteenth-century treatise Laokoön, where he investigates the differences between painting and epic writing. He finds that the painting exhibits the objects simultaneously whereas writing is consecutive. Painting shows everything in juxtaposition whereas, in writing, word follows word and page follows page. From this he deduces that the painter is able to depict a warrior in full battledress, whereas the writer commits a mistake if he were to describe this warrior by saying: He has a helmet on his head, a shield in his left hand and a sword in the right one. Strangely enough, few writers are aware of this mistake and wonder why their descriptions become boring, a result which stems from their wrong attempts to evoke a simultaneous picture in a consecutive form of art. Lessing explains that the writer must use action which is always consecutive in order to arrive at the same image which the painter can evoke by simultaneous exhibition. He proceeds to give the classic example, from Homer, the first and perhaps the greatest of all epic writers: instead of saying that the warrior wears a helmet, a shield, and a sword, Homer describes how the warrior lifts up the helmet and puts it on his head, then takes the shield from the wall and thereupon grips the sword. The resulting image in our mind is the same in both cases; but Homer uses consecutive action, adapting his method of telling to the consecutive progress of words.
The influence of the physical form upon the manner of telling the story is most obvious in the stage play, so much so that the conception of dramatic construction originated in the theatre. Indeed, the physical limitations of the stage impede the flow of the story to such an extent that the dramatic construction becomes of utmost importance. It is true that the motion picture is liberated from the restraint of the theatre. Because of the freedom of place and time the movie story appears to be more natural, as it is less afflicted by the rigidity of the form. But although its dramatic construction is less obtrusive, it would be entirely wrong to assume that it is less important. To the contrary, in spite of being more abstract, it is perhaps even more stringent. And it is more difficult to define and apply its laws.