In my previous post in this series on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, I posed a question about the things you may have noticed about the work.
You may have noticed some top level devices, such as genre, or symbolism. A bit deeper down, you may have noticed devices related to plot patterning, such as flashbacks, foreshadowing, or mirroring; at the level of writing style, such the use of repetition or alliteration.
What structures did you notice, just in reading through to however far you’ve got, if any?
If you spotted anything mentioned above, well done. But then, we’re used to spotting these kinds of narrative tricks. If you spotted anything else so far, even better.
When we get to the level of story structure, however, we’re in the territory of Christopher Booker’s The Seven Types of Plot—there are more than seven, actually. I’ve identified 18 distinct structures (excluding comedy and tragedy, which I demonstrate in my book are structure neutral)—or that of Joseph Campbell’s so-called ‘hero’s journey’ masterplot. To get to the level of story structure, we need to dig deeper than we’ve gone so far, and we need an easy way to identify and map the structural patterns we find.
In the first chapter of Blood Meridian, I’ve spotted a number of instances of two story structures I’ve found to be quite common – I call these the Quest structure and the Trickster structure. I’ll show you one and point to where you might find the other – There are other instances. I’m keen to find out where you might have spotted them.
In the methodology I use, I use six basic symbols from George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form to map the events in an individual character’s story line in chronological order.
After identifying the opening and the ‘who, when, where, situation’ of the character whose story line we’re going to map, I start to map the events that unfold for them in chronological order, and note the ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards’ qualities of these. To do this, I have to work out whether a particular event impels them towards a goal (in which case it’s notated with a forwards barb) or whether an event hinders them from reaching it (in which case it’s notated with a backwards barb).
The six symbols are all one really needs, along with some rules for expanding and contracting expressions. We need to reduce a story line to its bare bones in order to identify the story structure at play. It’s like a process of distillation or refining. It’s only once we distil content down to get down to the bare minimum needed to tell the story that we get to be able to understand what’s happening at the level of story structure. It’s a totally different approach to that of literary analysis. The rules for expansion and contraction are simple.
Sequences of the same step type can expand and contract as follows:
A double ( ↽ ↽ ) sequence of steps can contract to a single ( ↽ ) step.
A double ( ⇀ ⇀ ) sequence of steps can contract to a single ( ⇀ ) step.
A single ( ↽ ) step can expand to a double ( ↽ ↽ ) sequence.
A single ( ⇀ ) step can expand to a double ( ⇀ ⇀ ) sequence.
Sequences of different step types can expand and contract as follows:
A triple ( ↽ ⇀ ↽ ) sequence of steps can contract to a single ( ↽ ) step.
A triple ( ⇀ ↽ ⇀ ) sequence of steps can contract to a single ( ⇀ ) step.
What makes a story structure distinctive is the number of steps and the type of steps it contains in a reduced sequence that can be recognised as a stand-alone unit – each of the 18 story structures I’ve identified so far has its own character, but what The Unknown Storyteller reveals, for the first time ever, as far as I’m aware, despite the fact that we’ve been telling stories for literally thousands of years, is a theory about how the story structures relate, how they form parts of an integrated whole.
The Quest structure, in its basic form, contains 10 elements. It’s the structure which the story lines of the three pigs follow in the well-known folk tale of The Three Little Pigs.
In its simplest, graphic form, the Quest structure, as a bare bones structure can be simply and elegantly reduced to the following:
Let’s look at an example of where it can be seen in Blood Meridian. In Chapter 1, the kid’s ended up in New Orleans, where he spends his nights brawling in bars and back streets for the sheer fun of it.
On a certain night a Maltese boatswain shoots him in the back with a small pistol. Swinging to deal with the man he is shot again just below the heart. The man flees and he leans against the bar with the blood running out of his shirt. The others look away. After a while he sits in the floor.
He lies in a cot in the room upstairs for two weeks while the tavernkeeper's wife attends him. She brings his meals, she carries out his slops. A hardlooking woman with a wiry body like a man's. By the time he is mended he has no money to pay her and he leaves in the night and sleeps on the riverbank until he can find a boat that will take him on. The boat is going to Texas.
There’s a clear Quest structure that unfolds in his story line from the point at which he’s sitting on the floor. He realises he’s been wounded, but needs to recover. That’s his problem. His physical journey takes him from the floor of the bar to the ‘room upstairs’. Once there, there’s a journey of physical and psychological healing that’s involved. He’s helped by the tavernkeeper’s wife and eventually overcomes the limitations that bullets and gunshot wounds have inflicted on him. He’s ready to go.
At that point, a new problem arises for him. It’s very common for a character’s path to loop back like this – and it often happens in a ‘try, try, try again’ pattern. I go into the dynamics of this in my book, but for now, I’ll just ask you to accept that it works intuitively. It’s no different to what happens to the pigs, really. They have to experience the fall of a straw house and a twig house before they can end up living together in a brick house. Maybe this will be a bit like that - let’s see.
So the kid’s recovered, but now his problem is that he has no money to pay the tavernkeeper’s wife for board, lodging, or care. He needs to get away without being caught. He finds shelter on the riverbank and a boat heading to Texas that will take him on and he’s away.
And this is where things get more interesting. One could map this to a simple Quest structure, but there’s a deliberate intent to dupe here, and that points to the possibility of a Trickster structure here.
The Trickster structure is similar to the Quest structure, but what makes it distinctive is the quality of the interaction between the characters involved at the friend/helper and enemy/hindrance stages. In the Trickster structure, which many Aesopic fables and cartoons such as Tom and Jerry follow, we follow two characters’ story lines and find that while their story lines flow in parallel timewise, their individual quests conflict. Rather than the friend or helper being a genuine friend or helper, they turn out to be an enemy or hindrance, and a new symbol – the double-barb symbol ( ⇌ ) – is introduced to denote this quality. The Trickster structure plays out like this:
And in simple form, it’s scribed like this:
Knowing about these two structures and how they work can really help in coming to terms with what’s happening in a scene like this and analysing it on a level of story structure. It’s an approach which gives a different perspective. It complements other ways of looking at narrative, and adds to our understanding of how a narrative work operates as a whole.
Can the Trickster structure be used to pinpoint what’s happening between the kid and his carer?
Give it a try – see what you think.
If you enjoy story, find out more about The Unknown Storyteller project. It maps 18 distinct story structures (excluding comedy and tragedy) identified so far using only 6 simple basic visually intuitive symbols that will enable you to find out more about how story ‘stories’ on my website at leonconrad.com — not to mention some very cool writing exercises that will help you tell the stories you want to tell more effectively.