Two great WTFs of story

Ambiguity and uncertainty are the eighteen-wheel trucks of story, shaking all the other elements in their slipstream. You think not? Have a look at the outcome of your favorites in the novel or short form. You see any guarantees of certainty? Wiggle room abounds even in plot-driven stuff. And this is as it ought to be; we're all hard-wired to root for the underdog; our secret ballots are already mailed in, marked for the long shot. We want privilege and certainty to get either an outright comeuppance or at least an A-ticket on the rides of humiliation.

The former, ambiguity, says nothing is as it seems, a corollary we bring in from classes in Reality; the latter, uncertainty, says we're not always sure about how the things that are supposed to work out will in fact work out. Ambiguity. Rick is a good guy and all, but that's not a warranty that he'll be able to shrug off the latest offer of a bribe. "Don't assume I'm crooked," Samuel Spade tells us in The Maltese Falcon. How are we supposed to react when we've just learned that he's not only been messing around with his partner's wife, she mistakenly believes Spade killed Miles Archer so that he could be with her all the way. Maybe that's a bit of a stretch, a hard-edged example, but how many of us are pellucid, the light of honesty and openness radiating through us.

The latter, uncertainty, allows us to wonder who in our midst or in the ensemble of any cast of characters will break from patter, having taken all he or she could, wanting to make a statement or perhaps a break with the past. You can still read Theodore White's first volume in his Making of the President series and believe Adlai Stevenson is going to best Dwight Eisenhower. You can watch a rerun of the famed Orson Welles film, The Third Man, and think Anna Schmidt is going to walk off arm in arm with Holly Martins instead of walking right on past him. Dream on. Life is filled with enough uncertainties to make us recognize it when we see it in fiction.

We in fact love to argue about the way an event might have ended other than the way it ended, if--for instance--Al Gore had won the Bush v. Gore decision and the Florida votes would have continued to be counted. No trillion-dollar tab for Afghanistan and Iraq. No outrageous list of dead servicepersons and civilians. No neocon revisionist history memes and tropes being played out in VFW and American Legion halls all across the country. We might have been somebody, a contender instead of a punch drunk palooka.

Robert Burns nailed it:

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,

Gang aft agley,

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,

For promis'd joy!

Things--particularly things that can't go wrong, say oil rig things--can and do go wrong, and even though they can do considerable damage in reality when they do, there is no gainsaying that things in story go the wrongest of all.

Werner Heisenberg: Clueless or Just Uncertain?

When looking at behavior through the lens of quantum physics, it is helpful to keep in mind that the major thrust of examination is matter, which is expressed as particle for the purpose of investigating properties such as form,intensity, and location.  

There is an expressed duality in matter, which can present itself as wave or particle, a fact that more or less made the day for a physicist named Werner Heisenberg, of uncertainty fame.  Through the Heisenberg uncertainty principal, we are able to say, quantum physics style, that a watched pot does boil faster.  Heisenberg demonstrated that position and momentum, two properties of matter, cannot be known simultaneously to arbitrary precision.  In fact, the more one property is known, the less certain can we be of the other.

When looking at story through the lens of a vital dramatic quality such as, say,ambiguity, we have the duality of character and plot, which is to say the two elements cannot be known simultaneously to a certainty that the character produces or determines plot or the plot determines the behavior of the character.

Since we are on the subjects of ambiguity and duality, each of which I introduced as essential to the quantum physics of story, I posit that these conditions are to one another as character is to plot and, indeed, as wave is to particle.  

I wish to present a scenario in which a character says and or does something that will lead most readers to conclude the character is, arbitrarily, happy or, just as arbitrarily, unhappy.  The more the behavior of the character is tracked in terms of action, the greater the potential for a not insignificant portion of the audience to interpret the emotional outcome differently than my intention.  (We will not dwell for any time on the But-it-really-happened-that-way defense because the writer who does so is presenting evidence that the narrative is not drama but rather biography or journalism.)

Story has to present a duality, not so much for the democracy/bureaucracy of free choice as for the ambiguity resident in event, which is after all the staple of story.  Enough event and you have the basic unit of story, which is the scene.
Quantum mechanics presents a particle as being able to be represented in a mathematical formula that will indicate more or less where it can be found or in what state, an ambiguity that has to be reckoned with in a measurable way.  

Story also has propositions or proposals, but these thrive on the duality of possible interpretation and the ambiguity of intent triggered in the beholder.  I am, the protagonist says in story.  You are what? the duality asks.  I am vulnerable.  How is that to be measured and why should we care?  

That is to be measured by the degree to which you realize you are vulnerable, the degree to which this makes us aware of our own vulnerability, and the plan(s) you have devised or need to devise to extricate yourself, as well as what overall effect this will have on you.

The agony of moral choice which the protagonist in a character-driven drama is driven to make is one way of charting, quantum mechanics style.  How instructive would it be to graph out Henry Tudor (aka VIII), Thomas Moore, and Cromwell as each pursued the quantum mechanics of his agenda.

A Year or Two at the Early Morning Casino Buffets

As with Energy, Story is not continuous; each proceeds in small, discrete particles.

The elementary particles of Energy may travel as waves or particles; in Story, the discrete elementary bits travel as narrative or dialog.

Whether in Energy or Story, the movement of these particles is inherently random. Some writers, critics, literary agents, and publishers may speak of templates, which is to say outlines or formulae, and which opens the door for a full-on discussion about predictability. 

 Okay: in quantum physics, it is pretty nearly impossible to predict the movement of the particles associated with energy. In some types of stories, it is possible to predict when and where a particular event will exhibit an anticipated behavior. Nevertheless, even in such stories, surprise is an important part of particular behavior.

It is physically impossible in quantum mechanics to know the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time, to the point where the more one such element is known the less likely the possibility of obtaining the measurement of the other. In a more idiosyncratic way in story, the more one knows about the position of a character, the less likely the possibility of that character doing something of a surprising nature. And yet.

Characters do change their state and so it becomes a kind of quantum behavior to keep them in action, while observing them, applying among other things Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to them or, if you prefer to use your own name for the concept, applying to your changing characters your own name principle. The characters should change, undergo some kind of transmogrification.

What hubris to limit the appearance of absentmindedness merely to generic professors or to scientists. Writers may be properly distressed after having spent some time trying to chart the direction, the velocity, and the position of a character within the framework of some puzzling equation, only to find that the character already had a mind of its own, wanted no part of its creator.

As some quantum physicists seek for a Unified Theory which, they hope will explain Everything, some writers wish a theory that will minimize the randomness of life and the ongoing attempts of writers and poets to formulate a description that gets us all. It has in fact been apparent for any number of years. Someone wants something or someone. Put that in your cyclotron and turn on the motor. Then add who that person is so that a reader can decide what accommodations ar necessary before it is possible to root for that individual. Now add a certain knowledge of what that character will do to accomplish the previously depicted details.

Watch for surprises.

Lowenkopf's Uncertainty Principle

A quantum is an invisible entity of energy, say a poem, or short story, or novel. Quantum physics defines the position and momentum of an entity, say a poem, short story or novel.

A vector is an arrow drawn to scale, representing the magnitude and direction of an entity, say a poem, short story, novel, or photograph as it moves from its source somewhere in its creator to its impact point with a section of the viewers kishke.

Conjugate variables is another term from physics that seeks to define such observable dualities as magnitude and direction, time and space, or possibly even time and energy.

Werner Heisenberg, arguably one of the more insightful interpreters of quantum mechanics, noted the increased difficulty in measuring such conjugate variables. Thus the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, reduced to simplistic image with the observation: A watched pot never boils. 

 The more accuracy with which we measure one of the variables, the greater the uncertainty attending our ability to measure, much less define the variables. Indeed, Heisenberg's spectral self seems to be hovering over those physicists who are trying to define the initial state of our universe, thinking this would allow them to be able to predict behavior in the universe infinitely into the future.

Asking what makes a poem, short story, or novel linger in my sensitivities and, accordingly, in any one's sensitivities, brings Heisenberg to mind as a conjugate variable with the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. In the admittedly alternate universe in which I live, I find it necessary to have the quanta defined by poets and scientists. Yeats, one of my great favorites, was nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake. Indeed:

The Ballad of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
I cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream,
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name;
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded in the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and hold her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Heisenberg was able to walk among the long dappled grass of mathematics and the relationship of concepts. I am happy to think of him as My Man in Science.

You have only to know me to recognize that I dote on modern short story writers and novelists, even though I have spoken with affection in these entries of Hawthorne. I also add herewith D. H. Lawrence, whose splendid and diverse stories, "The Blacksmith's Daughter," and "The Rocking-Horse Winner," represent some lovely alpha and omega, respectively a gem from a rural landscape and another from an urban one. For me, these two have clearly lasted, withstood the test of time in the linear accelerator that passes for my mind. I can and will revisit them, speak of them with enthusiasm. Today, on Ben Huff's post, I saw two photos that gave me the most agreeable chills, a decidedly good sign.

As a writer, a reader, a reviewer, and a teacher, I bring four conjugate variables to the dinner table. Poems, short stories, novels, and photographs, since I began by mentioning these separate arts, are quanta, sometimes wave, sometimes particle, sometimes--amazingly--both. Attempting to apply a scientific judgment to them somehow deflects or undercuts the brilliance of the light they emit and my ability to bathe in that light.


This week is Oldie Week for my book review column. I have chosen Glendon Swarthout's remarkable, Bless the Beasts and Children, first published in 1970. You can read the review here.