The Kernel of the Corn
In your first writing assignment, you entered the play in order to discover its story (Hedda Gabler or Importance of Being Earnest), and you imagined (and helped your reader imagine) a performance of that story, though the performance was only in the storyteller’s (your) words, which included the given words of the play. Performance fits (or “forms” to) the significant points. The story you were telling was your story, but it was also—and primarily—Ibsen’s or Wilde’s. In a sense, in telling the story, you were performing the play.
What is story (mythos) in a play? It is plot, “the arrangement of the incidents” (Aristotle) with a beginning, middle, and end (telos), and significant points along the way. A plot traces the whole story, which is all that connects the significant points and completes the form.
If you think of a plot as a line, then the significant points are where the line turns, which is a metaphor for where a character, who has an expectation of reaching a certain goal, encounters the unexpected and now must change direction. One character’s change of destination will (in story, as in life) necessitate other characters to change. The whole configuration of characters in a play adjusts to the unexpected (the turn) with the forming of a new expectation (the line). The plot can be discerned or mapped by discovering those significant moments of change, where the expected meets the unexpected. In a plot, “people do such things.”
The telling of any part of a story (and part of a story is what a plot (mythos) is) will have an end (telos), which will get to the point, goal, target (telos), which is what the story “knows,” i.e. its thought (Aristotle’s third element), better understood as its thinking through, which in the case of a narrated story might be explained to you by the narrator but in the case of a drama is conveyed to you by the characters thinking through their place and time—their situation—in the plot. The play could be said to conduct a thinking through from beginning to middle to end, and by the end the telos is known. As audience, we listen to what the characters know about their situation (both through what is explicit in their words and what is implicit in their actions) in order to understand how they fit into the plot, because their thinking through brings us to the story’s telos, which is its point. Could be an idea (that word I don’t particularly like—theme). Could be an effect (katharsis). Could be something that reflects on your own conscious and conscious systems of knowing yourself and knowing the world—your moral sense, your learned and intuited understanding, your taste, etc. Could be an argument. In many cases, it is all these things.
DETAILED ASSIGNMENT
