Nowadays we have a tendency for quick and slick moralizations, either that or we turn every failing into a therapeutic self-improvement project. Contrast this with the world of Greek tragedy wherein intractable life problems drive characters to bloody murder and suicide. It is a world governed by Fate; you accept what’s coming or you don’t, though not accepting your Fate doesn’t make a bit of difference about what’s coming. You can protest all you want, but it doesn’t do any good. Oddly enough, the idea of Fate renders mourning more trenchant and plausible than our pat complacencies about self-determination, social justice, and human rights. What essential element of grief is lost if you know there are seven stages and you are at Stage Three?
I’m thinking about this because I just finished reading Donald Breckenridge’s new novel As It Falls (Ellipsis Press, pub date March 23) which implicitly sets up a contrast or analogy between contemporary urban America and the world of Greek Tragedy. Let me quickly do the formalities: As It Falls is a short book, about 140 pages, broken into sections by linebreaks, but no chapters. In the middle, there are three pages of facsimile typescript of a play entitled As It Falls. The sections alternate between a number of narrative threads, four main ones, but more develop toward the end.
1) It’s a somewhat autobiographical novel, and one of the main story lines follows a first person narrator (much like Donald Breckenridge) living in Brooklyn in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. This narrator relates the circumstances of his birth, how he was given up for adoption by his mother in California in 1967 and what he knows of his mother from the adoption papers (not much). Over the course of the novel, this narrator tells us about his early writing career as a dramatist and theater producer, his attempts to make his mother’s story into a play, and his disastrous first marriage and infidelities.
2) The imagined story of how his 19-year-old coed mother had an affair with an older married man with three children that led to her pregnancy. This ends with her living with an aunt in California until the baby is born and adopted. The married man is a piano-playing insurance adjuster; there’s a lovely pattern of jazz references running through the book. The mother self-reported (in the adoption papers) that she dabbled in writing plays. On p34, the Breckenridge-narrator says this:
My biological mother had always been a hero of mine. For the sake of these pages she is my Antigone. I’ve never wanted to discover her identity.
which links her with storylines #3 and #4.
3) The Greek myths and tragic plays dealing with Oedipus and the hot mess in Thebes. Oedipus is not exactly given up for adoption; he is exposed on a hillside and picked up by a shepherd who passes him on to his adoptive parents. Later, he kills his birth father (sort of by accident), marries his mother, and has four children, the youngest being Antigone. Later, as an old man (he has put out his own eyes), he wanders to Colonus with Antigone as his guide and caregiver. He dies there, but Antigone discovers her own Fate in a squabble over the burial rights for her undeserving brother Polynices. Condemned to death by being buried alive, she hangs herself. The king’s son, Haemon, is in love with her; he kills himself, too. Then Haemon’s mother kills herself. And so on.
4) The story of a bisexual actor named Michael in 1981 who is appearing in a production of the play Oedipus alongside an aging movie star named Kate in the role of Jocasta. Michael and Kate are having an affair, but this is mostly told in retrospect because very early in the novel he is diagnosed with AIDS. Michael kills himself with an intentional overdose. Actually, he kills himself but doesn’t realize at first that he is dead until late in the novel when he meets another man who has died of AIDS.
As the novel wears on, the story of Breckenridge’s mother fades out but is replaced with lovely elaborations of the Antigone motif. For example, there is a young hotel chambermaid in Brooklyn and her blind father. They are illegal immigrants, last expelled from Canada. And then there is a little story about a pair named Antigone and Haemon, former dealers and drug addicts, hiding out in a fishing village in Mexico, but doomed. And, most beautifully, a couple of scenes in which the narrator is giving stage instructions to an actor taking the role of Creon, the king of Thebes who condemns Antigone to death.
I could say much more about this descriptively. The inter-cutting of stories, the mutual motivation and parallel actions, the witty coincidences, and internal links of image and word pattern are delightful. But I like to try to analyze basic structures. The novel’s kernel is the story of Breckenridge’s birth and adoption, leading to the fictional story of his mother and father and their fateful meeting in 1967. This is the core narrative, the ur-narrative.
To this kernel, the author adds a shadow text, that is, a technique by which the author adds a parallel text outside the narrative by way of analogy. In this case, he links his mother to Antigone and introduces that whole cluster of Greek tragedies. (There is some pleasant syncopation in the book; the stories of Michael and Kate and Oedipus start up in the text long before the author makes the connection explicit. Then the reader has this delightful aha! moment.)
Shadow texts are a technique of elaboration1, a crafty way of expanding a text, not just expanding for length, but for drawing out and rendering precise moral and emotional implications. They are a tool for adding meaning to the original story. Also rhythm and an echo effect. But you can elaborate elaborations2, which is what Breckenridge is doing here.
This book reminds me of that wonderful scene in one of the Alien movies (off hand, I forget which one) when Ripley walks into a research lab filled with glass cases housing hybrid replicas of herself, Ripley after Ripley after Ripley. In this instance, Antigone after Antigone. Each iteration of Antigone paints in a slightly different version of herself, and they are all versions of the author’s imagined birth mother. If you read carefully, you can see the similarities. Antigone is young, open, loving, caring, determined, and brave. She does not shirk her Fate, but she does not despair either. She is far from the world of therapeutic support. Breckenridge makes one sly reference to Freud and his Oedipus complex in the whole novel.
As It Falls substitutes these multiple story lines for a conventional plot, that thrumming uni-linear pattern of desire and resistance that usually runs through a novel from beginning to end. The longest continuous plot-like narrative here is the story of the narrator’s parents meeting in 1967 and producing him. After that, the text is mostly a proliferation of these other threads linked by characters named Antigone, the Greek plays Oedipus and Antigone, and the writing of plays.
The writing of plays is something the Breckenridge-narrator shares with his 19-year-old coed mother. (His infidelities link him with his philandering insurance adjuster father.) At the age of 25, he tries and fails to write a play about her. Yet he comes to realize that in some crucial way she is at the center of his creative impulses. He nails this in the following piece of meta-fictional reflection.
While attempting once more to fictionalize this story, now more than half a century after the facts, it is apparent to me that the aspiring playwright who appeared on that Xeroxed copy of the questionnaire I received from the Children’s Home Society of California has always been my sole author. The fallible young woman who lived out some forever unknowable variation on a handful of these scenes, and who possessed the courage to carry me for nine months, is the primary source of my every line.
And again:
I think of her as my starting point in this life, and as the young aspiring playwright whose language I inhabited in order to tell their story.
The effect of all this structural elaboration is to create a novel that works as an echo chamber where bits of text, character relationships, and actions repeat over and over in different times and contexts with Breckenridge’s young, fallible, courageous play-writing mother as the common ground.
We’re often too used to reading for plot to realize that at some level this is always the way good novels are structured. Subplots are the most common device of structural elaboration in novels, secondary plots that reflect and refract the main plot. What Breckenridge has done so brilliantly is to maximize the proliferation of subplots, each one inviting the reader to reflect upon the main story in a different way.
A musical analogy is apt, especially as Breckenridge pays such close attention to jazz recordings and performance in the novel. Here is Aldous Huxley describing how a novel works in his novel Point Counterpoint3.
The musicality of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound. (Pleuvent les bleus baisers des astres taciturnes. Mere glossolalia). But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. (Majesty alternating with a joke, for example, in the first movement of the B flat major quartet. Comedy suddenly hinting at prodigious and tragic solemnities in the scherzo of the C sharp minor quartet.) More interesting still the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further. Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example…
Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways--dissimilars solving the same problem. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: The novelist can assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story in their various aspects--emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical, etc.
Breckenridge’s structural pyrotechnics are counterpoised against a narrative style that is down-to-earth, emotionally restrained, conversational, and concretely realistic (except, of course, for the dead Michael flying around New York, seeing other dead people and, yes, pterodactyls). It’s a hard-won style, earned through years of writing plays, then more years of writing and rewriting novels, and a growing emotional maturity. Above all, it is a style born of the author’s desire to empathize with his birth parents and do them justice, “aiming to be as impartial as possible while allowing the narrative to simply reveal itself.” Adoption stories are prone to the trauma-narrative treatment, wherein the victim child blames his or her insufficiencies on the sins of the parent. Breckenridge’s approach is Puritan in its honesty and resistance to emotional effluvia. “My biological father should be defined by his deficiencies, yet without any hand-wringing sermonizing and lazy moralizing.”
Yet, without the moralizing, As It Falls is a deeply moral book, offering a calm, generous, and forgiving judgment on our common human catastrophe. Breckenridge does this in two ways. First, through his reflections on his parents and the writing of their story just mentioned. And second, through his thoughts on the tragic characters of Oedipus and Antigone. This is the cunning of structure. You can use the elaborately proliferating subordinate plots to illuminate the main plot. Just by bringing in Oedipus and Antigone and identifying his mother with Antigone, Breckenridge adds a tragic and mythic dimension to the story of his mother.
But Breckenridge finds several ways of thematizing his multiple Antigone stories. I’ll give just one example to close. This is from a sequence of scenes involving a young woman named Antigone and her blind old father Oedipus, impoverished, illegal aliens in contemporary Brooklyn. (It’s also a lovely example of a technique Breckenridge often employs, mixing dialogue and narrative in a single flow of narrative.) This is Oedipus talking; I start in mid-stream.
…that deep unwavering voice, “just as you happen to be the result of an unholy yet loving union between two people who did not have the slightest control over the outcome of their destinies [Note how these words could (and do) apply to both Breckenridge’s parents and Antigone’s parents, Oedipus and Jocasta.],” yet his shoulders were hunched, “Never wish for life to turn out as you want it to,” while wearing the discarded clothes she recently scavenged, “instead wish for everything to happen as it actually happens,” from piles of rain-sodden garbage, “and that way you will live a peaceful existence.”4
With words like these, Breckenridge reasserts the tragic quality of human experience and reanimates old, good words like grief, pity, and acceptance, words we are in sore need of in these our doomed and depleted days.
So the technical sequence is something like kernel - analogy - shadow text - multiple duplications.
This is the ONLY book I kept from my freshman year English class and it is has had a profound influence on my reading for structure. Strange to think.
When I ran the magazine Numéro Cinq, I published excerpts from As It Falls when it was a work-in-progress. Also a very useful interview with Donald Breckenridge.
A fascinating take, Doug. Way too long since I read this!
Wow. More than a note! Must read this. Douglas have you read Russell Banks’ Magical Kingdom? Someone on fb recommended it.