Unity

This topic came to me as I was playing the Royal Game a few months back. The Royal Game is of course, chess.

In chess, it is imperative that every move made fulfill several requirements at once. That move not only has to be the best possible move, it also has to fit in with the game plan.

There are some moves that need not be so strictly categorized. There is a need for considerable flexibility, but the general guidelines are that a move perform the duties outlined earlier.

By way of example, about to make a move, a player notices that the opponent's piece is unguarded or en prise as chess players call it. Some questions pop up: is that piece really unguarded or is it a trap? Has my opponent been playing badly or well so far? That answer will go some way to understanding whether or not that piece is really up for grabs without repercussion.

I haven't played competitive chess in a while, but the other night I happened to be at a local Borders Bookstore on chess night. I decided to put down the book I was reading (Aristotle's Poetics) and play a game.

As I started adjusting the pieces, I wondered if it would be possible to apply any dramatic principles to the game. The Aristotelian principles of unity was uppermost in my mind as I made the first move as black. Since the white side always moves first, I was responding to his move and I almost always play the Caro-Kann defense as black.

The Caro-Kann is a specific sequence of moves in response to those also of a specific sequence made by the player on the white side. That sequence, regardless of the opening, usually ends after about 10 to 12 moves. It's been worked out by strong players which the best moves are up to a point; chess players call this “theory.” After that, the players leave that realm (Vogler's the “ordinary world”) and attempt to construct plans that will take them from the opening into the middle game and hopefully, into the endgame.

Sound familiar?

Since I hadn't played in a while, I remembered only the very first few moves (around five) and I hoped he wouldn't divert quickly from theory. This is the great danger of simply memorizing theoretical moves: your opponent doesn't cooperate and that's it, you're lost. Indeed, after only a few moves, I noticed my opponent was quickly veering off the well-trodden path.

I resolved then to play each move for maximum efficiency and kept up the mantra of unity: each move had to be based on a plan. I remembered that the black side of the Caro-Kann usually ended up attacking on the queen side of the board so every move I made, I needed to maneuver pieces over to that side while making sure I wasn't too particularly open on the king side.

White's general plan in the Caro-Kann is to attack on the king side. The reason this is dangerous for black is that chess is decided by the “capture” of the king, the checkmate. While the black side was playing to attack white's queen side—a decidedly less dangerous option as you may imagine—white would be gunning for my king so I had to juggle these two options (attack while simultaneously defending), a type of dilemma I guess.

I'll be talking about dilemma in one of my next few posts. I'm intrigued by this tool that Jeff Kitchen explores in his book, Writing a Great Movie.

So every move I made had to do almost triple duty: defend, attack, or stabilize. Sometimes one more than the other two but very often all three. This is not an easy thing to do need I say? Jeff Kitchen says that structuring a play is like being in a fight in which you can only throw one punch. Well I was in a fight now.

I ended up winning the game because my plan was better. It was better and faster and balanced. I got to demolish white's queen side faster than he got to my king. I started making him react to me rather than the other way around even though I started the game by reacting. This is something you'll notice not only in chess, but in many other fields: the person reacting is usually the loser.

In drama, the protagonist may end up having to react for a while, and certainly to an inciting incident at first. However, as the story proceeds, the protagonist of necessity is no longer reacting. She now drives the story and subsequent reactions are no longer hers but (usually) the antagonist's.

I apologize for the rambling nature of the post, but achieving unity even in posts is a very difficult thing to do. (Grin.)

So, unity. Everything that occurs in a dramatic story not only has to be reactionary—each event or beat leads to the other, like dominoes—but also relevant. Relevance is unity. One has to choose wisely and parsimoniously those events that move the story forward, but which are also dramatically necessary. Otherwise, you'll have committed the dreaded crime (in Aristotle's view) of episodic writing.

People react in all sorts of ways up to and including irrationally. In fact, one may make the argument that humans almost always make the irrational choice, but that's another post. In drama, one has to choose the dramatically “correct” action, no matter the infinite number of actions possible. That action has got to be in unity with the story.

An antagonist, say, who does something completely out of character is a useless antagonist. In fact, he is no longer an antagonist because he's no longer dramatically relevant. In the setup that is Act I, the audience will have come to understand that no matter what happens, even if surprising, a character's actions are indeed possible, and of course!, we knew it all along that he would do such and such. In the spectrum of possibilities, dramatic characters are forced to choose from only a small chunk of choices in order to dramatic unity.