We talk about the plot of a novel or a film (such as Javier Marías’s The Face Tomorrow or Hitchcock’s On the Heels of Death) and the plot of March of March, The Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot, or Gürtel. .
Just as the fiction writer constructs his narratives by arranging the characters, times, places, and relationships between them, starting from the end (that is, the narrator does not wait for events to unfold, as we poor mortals do in our lives, but rather waits for events to occur). This is what happens with conspiracy theories that elevate the plot to the level of conspiracy: in both cases, an all-powerful being is pulling the strings, while we humans and characters are incompetent puppets. Mercy is at his command, as well as the delusion that we are propelled by a real engine powered by our own gasoline.
But this connection is not symmetrical: it is less difficult for us to think of conspiracies as stories (and many have become stories: from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery), than it is for us to think of stories as conspiracies. However, as the Great Narrator, this conspirator figure is the author of assassinations, attacks, election results, epidemics, wars, economic crises, etc. It applies equally to all the powerful people in the shadows who are behind it (whether proven conspiracies or imaginary conspiracies). (Masons, Jesuits, witches, Jacobins, Jews, Islamists, Illuminati, Bilderberg Club, US Federal Government, NASA, aliens, UN, Rockefellers, Bill Gates, George Soros, WHO, pharmaceutical companies) Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Pérez As for Galdós, Clarín, Cortázar or Javier Marías; they arbitrarily take Emma, Raskólnikov, Marcel, Gabriel de Araceli, Ana Ozores or Jaime Deza as the authors of their own stories.
What has been said, of course, also applies to faith stories: those who believe in Zeus, Poseidon, Aphrodite or Athena (conspirators who have conflicting stories and are based on Olympus) believers in Yahweh, God or Athena everyone. God (the all-powerful autocrat in his own narrative universe, albeit pitted against each other in transcendent geopolitics) also agrees to be part of a scenario that does not depend on him.
The conspiracy (breathing too close together, breaking the pinion, colluding against a third party) is a source of inspiration (breath blown into your ear), a source of termination (the story comes out of the mouth), and a source of termination (fueling the conspiracy and inciting terror and pity). you have to kill someone for) is almost natural, and not just because of common etymology. God inspired the Evangelists to teach the various conspiracies of a wise storyteller: He gives Adam and Eve nearly unlimited freedom but imposes an absurd prohibition that he knows they will humanly ignore, he spoils Abel to provoke his brother’s jealousy, Abraham, extolling the faith that would lead him to commit fundamentalist infanticide (which he conveniently stopped after a harrowing cliffhanger), sacrificing his own son for a greater cause, and then introducing the deus ex machina on the third day.
There is a painting that summarizes this all important part of the celestial plot: the middle panel of the Saint Columba triptych by Rogier van der Weyden in Munich: this is a painting with the Adoration of Kings on it. We see a cross hanging on the column in the middle of the Bethlehem portal, where Mary and the child are located, as if this is a spoiler for the characters. We already know how this story will end, but we don’t know how ours will end: so each story is, in a way, a source of both comfort and envy.
Frozen life, warm story
Walter Benjamin expressed this with great prudence: He said that the novel is not important to us because it represents an alien and instructive destiny, that is, a pedagogy of exemplary lives or counterexamples to be avoided, but it is in these conflagrations. There is a certainty of fate in the lives of others, and we, the readers, warm our frozen lives, devoid of a certain fate, next to it. While lives in stories have a purpose and an understandable ending, the life we live is exposed to the icy wind of chance, clumsiness, misunderstandings, and the shocking inconclusiveness of an ending that is as certain as it is unknown. Our lives are stand-ins for the characters in the story, warm wombs in which we find the solace of a higher plan that commands them, of an end written and known by someone.
Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, sought a compromise between her own life and the narrative work of others: telling us about our lives. He pointed out that every narrative seems to deceptively imitate the unpredictability, fragility and contingency of human existence, it is true, but if we do not make our own story into a story, there is neither understanding nor acceptance: one’s own sorrows, as well as those told, are only sorrows. It is about finding a channel that is understandable and bearable when and because it is explained. The earthly “doomsday”, different and superior to that of the tooth, comes when each person discovers this little truth of the stories and is able to weave the narrative thread of his own life. Of course it is fruitless..
Accounting of the story
But there are stories and stories. What danger threatens any storyteller? What did William Labov say to this? So what is the skill that prevents this? This is what he calls tellability, and it is not the same as narration. What makes a story a story is “tellability”. But tellability, which cannot be translated (because if we say “responsibility”, we have to specify the description of the story, we have to specify the description of the story) is what makes some stories worth telling because of something intrinsic they have: ourselves: so what else?, as the sultan does to Scheherazade : some stories save lives.
This accounting appears to have some universal components, although it can be adapted to different latitudes. Labov tells the anecdote about the best-selling recipe in France: A good story had to contain mystery, sex, aristocracy and religion. So all these things taken together suggested such a beginning: “Oh God,” cried the marquis, “I am pregnant, who will be the father?” Think Dangerous Liaisons, but if we replace the aristocracy with the wealthy bourgeoisie, there is room for soap operas, Buñuel, Berlanga and Almodóvar, Mamma mia, and pink and black chronicles (we sampled both last summer). ) From heart programs.
There are stories that provide better broth than others because they reflect various alternative paths in the mind of the recipient (as in the garden of Borges’s famous story). The story favors one of these, but that doesn’t stop the reader or viewer from placing their bets. The inevitability of an outcome is its irreversible nature that gives a story its power, but this does not hinder, but rather almost stimulates the recipient’s imagination towards other expected scenarios. The closure of the narrative decided by others may surprise us or fail to meet our expectations, it may disappoint us because we expected something else, or because we saw exactly too much coming. But we can’t do anything about it. Or if?
Buyer as producer
When Titanic was released, hundreds of millions of viewers were devastated by the sight of Jack sinking into the icy waters of the North Atlantic, while Rose bid farewell to the floating wreckage that had allowed her to save herself. Fortunately, some did not give up. A few years ago, one creator in particular used visuals from Leonardo Di Caprio’s (The Beach, The Aviator, Catch Me If You Can, Inception, Shutter Island), Kate Winslet’s (Sense and Sensibility, Wonder Wheel, Divergent) or other films. He had taken it. both (Revolutionary Road), even others where shipwreck is implied (an episode of the TV series Downtown Abbey) or ships across the polar ice (The Terror). With them, he composed various short films and trailers for non-existent films, which had alternative endings, added voice-overs or subtitles, weaving new narrative threads. In the first one, it was revealed that Jack arrived on an island exhausted. Rose rebuilt her life (as in Cast Away with Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt), but Jack decided to call her, and they eventually became together and happy parents with several children. Or Jack died, but the Titanic’s ruins allowed him to recover his DNA in 2053, clone him into a new being with his memories intact, and speed up his growth until he met Rose’s great-great-granddaughter Ivy (played). By Kate Winslet, of course) ), who is also the brilliant scientist of the project. Amateur narrator VJ4rawr2 on YouTube is definitely a big conspirator.
We want more history when it is incomplete, we want to have the power to prolong it when it is already closed: we do not accept being limited to the field of the imagination, which seems inherently limitless, like an expanding universe. The fact that the end of a story does not satisfy us, that dissatisfaction is the fuel that ignites the spark of others, that it is sometimes sharp, sometimes crazy, sometimes nourishing, sometimes consoling, means that the story is an inexhaustible source of pleasure and anxiety.
*Raúl Rodríguez Ferrándiz is Professor of Mass Media Semiotics at the University of Alicante.