The Hypostatic Union of Storytelling · 2:32pm Feb 4th, 2017
If you have ever been deep into a theology course or done serious studying of Christianity for any length of time, you might be familiar with the concept of the hypostatic union. For those of you who are less well read on the subject, it's the technical term for the particular belief that Jesus Christ was both fully man and fully God, and that these two elements were inseparable in their nature in his incarnation. The concept arose after disputes within the church ranging as far back as the first century C.E. resulted in full schisms. The hypostatic union was central to these schisms, since it represented the dominant view that eventually became the orthodox creed of the early church, with opposing views of Christ relegated to heresies. If the specifics here seem a little vague, remember that much of modern Christian teaching is derived from the concept of substitutionary atonement - the idea that Christ's sacrifice and suffering were sufficient to save all of humanity. Those who espoused the doctrine of the hypostatic union argued that Christ's full Godhead and full humanity were both equally necessary for his death to serve as a sacrifice. If he were not God, he could not provide a truly perfect sacrifice any more than hundreds of millions of other humans might have. If he were not man, then his death and suffering would have been only pageantry.
I'm bringing this up not because I want to teach you somewhat obscure lessons about Christianity but because the hypostatic union serves as a kind of illustrative point. The basic idea behind it is that in order to understand the orthodox view of Christ, you have to be willing to entertain the idea that he's two things wholly and simultaneously, with his entire nature being made up of both. It's a view that refuses to break his identity down into component pieces, and encourages you to examine what it means as a whole. And whether that's theologically sound or not I'll leave for you to decide, I personally have no interest in debating it when the complete divinity/humanity of Christ is probably what interests me least about him as a concept. What I like about it is that it's a good example of considering something as a whole and then explaining why it matters that it is a whole.
Why is that important? Because I think it makes it easier to understand when you're reading a bad (or good) story.
I'm going to use the word "storytelling" instead of writing for the remainder of this post because I think this is advice that exists outside the realm of just writing. Film, animation, theater, and art - even non-sequential art - are all mediums in which storytelling takes place, and sometimes writing isn't the most crucial element of storytelling depending on your medium (I know, heresy). I'm going to assume that the majority of people who read this blog are either writers or have aspirations related to writing though, and writing is where I have the most specific experience, so feel free to substitute words as needed. Also bear in mind that much modern storytelling is collaborative in nature to some degree, and so when I say "storyteller", singular, it might also be worth thinking about how a team or group functions as a single storytelling unit.
Evaluating storytelling is more difficult than most people think.
The problem with evaluating storytelling is that there's really at least two different axes on which to evaluate relative quality, and there's no universal metric for calculating where the points of perfect synthesis lie along them without invoking comparisons to other stories. The first axis is the technical ability of the storyteller and their grasp of the medium they're working in. This is actually relatively straightforward to evaluate depending on how familiar you are with the storytelling medium of choice. The more you know about the English language in general, the better you are at understanding when a writer's prose is excellent or mediocre, for instance. Technical brilliance is often under or over-valued depending on which circle of people you're talking to. People deeply embedded within an industry tend to value technical excellence more highly than a general audience, and general audiences tend to be less able to grasp the fundamentals of what makes something technically brilliant and thus often don't see it.
The second major axis is a bit more difficult to understand, or even put into words. The best way I can describe it is "the axis of content". A story's success along this axis involves many familiar writing canards you're probably used to - the story's worldbuilding, its characters, the relative novelty of its premise, the actual plot, and the general choice of over-arching tones and themes. These elements of storytelling are more difficult to evaluate because good characters and premises can be polarizing on some level. Even when they aren't, the internet has taught a generation of audience members to look out for what I'd call "easy/gotcha" flaws - "Mary Sues" are a prime example of terrible ways to evaluate writing along this axis because they aren't actually dealbreakers for successful storytelling until you start adding other caveats.
I'd actually like to propose a third axis as well, which I'm tentatively going to call the "moral axis". Some stories are told in a technically brilliant fashion and have a strong grasp of how to present ideas and characters, but the ideas and characters they present are either explicitly or accidentally terrible. Stories don't so much "pass" or "fail" on this metric as they just "exist" along it, which is why it's fundamentally different than the two I just mentioned. Birth of a Nation created the fundamentals of storytelling that helped shape the idea of a blockbuster movie, but it also explicitly glorified the Ku Klux Klan and dehumanized black Americans. This doesn't mean it isn't an example of great storytelling and we should stop studying it in film history classes, but it does mean that not every well-told story is necessarily morally good. I think the confusion between a story existing in the "not so great" range of the moral axis vs. the other two is a strong example of why it's hard to have a conversation about "problematic" art. Some art genuinely is morally repugnant or just uncomfortable, and that does need to be addressed - but conversely, trying to destroy or get rid of morally repugnant art is actually less effective at dealing with it than simply allowing for public discourse about where its failings along the moral axis were vs. the other two. It's also important to recognize that appreciating art in spite of moral failings is a very different thing than appreciating it because of moral failings.
Now here's the problem. Aside from the moral axis, which is separate only because it directly concerns the moral evaluation of the reader and not the success or failure of the storyteller, the content axis and technical axis don't actually exist as wholly independent concepts. In many cases, they tend to inform each other. A superb content axis score means absolutely nothing if the storyteller manages to get a big goose-egg on the technical axis. How can you evaluate content when it's being delivered badly? Conversely, a really average score on the technical axis is sometimes enhanced or overcome entirely by strong content, and weak or average content can be borne up by strong technical scores. Stories aren't just their delivery and medium and they aren't just their content either. They are both of those things existing as a unit, and that makes their evaluation many times more difficult than it might be otherwise. (And actually, it's not impossible for the moral axis to directly destroy the quality of a story when the storyteller unintentionally creates a morally deficient character or theme when they had not explicitly intended to champion that viewpoint).
I know that I probably shouldn't beat the dead horse too much more, but "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi" is actually a great example of what I'd call the Obscuring Axis Effect. It's a pretty bad story, but the badness is obscured by two things: the content is not bad on its own, and the technical elements of the story are equally fine on their own. I've already mentioned that as a short story it succeeds in the first goal of any short story, which is the use of a single prevailing mood or idea throughout. Most readers either evaluated the story very highly, or didn't say anything. And how could they? I imagine more than a few people read the story and couldn't articulate exactly what was wrong about it, because no one component was actually wrong in and of itself.
The answer is that the failing is pervasive. It exists as a sort of feedback loop between failings in the content influencing the technical delivery which further influences the content. "Sic Transit" has a pervasive mood, yes, but it has no real pervasive and cogent ideas. Almost all of the ones it introduces are dismissed as soon as they appear and the story barely dwells on their implications, which means that all of the technical competence is being used to deliver basically nothing to the audience. It relies heavily on the idea that since the audience is vaguely familiar with Friendship is Magic, merely suggesting sad things is the same thing as actually writing about them. And many of the sad things it writes about aren't conducive to the basic idea that the glory of the world is, in fact, passing.
But all of that is invisible unless you're evaluating the story as a whole made up of parts, not just as disparate parts that you're assigning some kind of numerical score to. If we could do that with all storytelling, I can't imagine what the world would look like but I imagine it would be poorer for it. if storytelling is the act of using a particular medium to create a cohesive whole, we can't evaluate it only as success or failure along disconnected axes. We have to understand it as what's created when those axes intersect and influence each other. Stories aren't just their content or just their medium of delivery. They're entities consisting of both. And that's what makes them exciting.
Whether or not you're ready to profess faith in the magical and somewhat contradictory union of man and the divine, I think we should all be ready to think of stories as unions between use of medium and created content.
Hey we were talking about some of this the other day.
Also--yay Nicea
Yay for more clever blogs. Some very fascinating points as always.
Very interesting, this has given me a good bit to think about.
I love these blogs. I always come away from them with something new to think about.
Man, now I wonder what Mr. Numbers thinks of your dissection of that story.
I presume you two talked it over a bit?
I wish I was adept at thinking about stuff like this as you. :B
I wrote out a thing with a bunch of "counter-examples", but upon rereading I think I'm actually agreeing with you? Anyway, I put too much work into this comment to just delete it, so here:
One of the stories right here on Fimfic that's stuck with me is More About Time. The narration has serious issues with redundancy and needlessly spelling out details that were implicit in the dialogue. In almost any other story, it would be enough to make me drop it and never come back. But something about this story's premise made me give it a second chance, and I found it was a very interesting take on a stock plot about time travel, and I'm glad I read it.
The same principle is at work in genre fiction. In my experience, quite a lot (but by no means all) of classic SF is competent but dull prose about bland protagonists; they're classics solely because of ground-breaking premises. (And I suspect many of those authors would say this is a feature, not a bug!) And, of course, there's porn, where the writing quality you can get away with is inversely proportional to the obscurity of the fetishes you're catering to.
And, of course, on the opposite end, there's literary fiction and the accusation of "pretension". If we're charitable to the critics and assume they aren't just using "pretentious" as a buzzword, one of the meanings of the accusation is: this story takes a simple idea and presents it in a complex way, and that approach doesn't fit. And no matter how many people out there agree that X is pretentious (whatever X is), you'll still find people who defend X. So there is an audience for stories with technically brilliant mechanics propping up a bland concept.
I think this is a big thing for people to understand.
That being said:
The thing is, playing your cards close to your chest (i.e. implying something happened, but not actually showing it) can work very well if you have already created a strong emotional connection within the audience (or, in the case of fanfiction, if someone else has already done so). Indeed, what is not seen combines with what is seen to create all stories, and using this effectively can add a lot of weight and power to a story. I think a lot of punchy things are punchy in part because of the aura of things around them - you can put a lot more weight behind a few thousand words if people have expectations built around them already.
It is sort of like the monster in the dark - if you don't know what is lurking in the darkness, it can be quite fearsome if you've created the aura of that feeling around it.
Insightful and well argued. Continue to be awesome.
4409292 fair point. I suppose a better way of phrasing it would be "know how much to suggest", since in Sic Transit's case it never seems to suggest quite enough and leave it alone.
4409199 Only if you count the fact that he's in the comments of the actual post where I dissected it in detail.
4409038 I did it for you and you know it <3
4409089 Huzzah!
4409271 You're one hundred percent agreeing with me. My larger point is that stories need to be considered holistically, not just as success/failures on scales.
4409340 And now I"m blushing. X3
Seriously you guys, thanks for all the love. Been a long day at work and it was nice to come back to this.
So... what you're saying is it's both a floor wax and a dessert topping?
4409677 No, Patrick, that's modalism!
4409691
Now... Voltron, I understand! Well... okay, no I don't. I just accept Voltron. Better for everybody that way. 
Not pickin' up on what you're layin' down, Patrick!
4409664 talk theology to me <3
You continue to be very clever.
Please don't stop.
I would like to again state for the record I am more than happy, I am absolutely delighted even, to have this story ripped apart critically. That was my sincerest hope in creating it, and that never really happened.
Even if we disagree on how much this succeeded as satire, I'm proud to have at least succeeded in the objective to make it a textbook example bad-but-popular story, and I wouldn't have anyone else author the actual textbook itself.
This is an interesting topic that I don't find easy to break down into handily digestible parts, but are nonetheless pretty important to regard. The return to your fast becoming infamous example was helpful in having it make a little more sense, but I was still hoping for a little more, perhaps an exact pinpoint (x,y) sort of part/example that could be used as a moment in story, space and time that highlights both axis. Axi. Axiseses? Because I feel like I understand - if not the topic - than that there is a topic-shaped area here that can be learned about.
So I'd like to take a crack at pinning down a finely focused-in example, and please let me know if I'm more or less getting the right sense of things:
The example I'd like to use is Star Wars Rogue One - in particular, a single scene towards the end. And I hope I'm making use of the technical axis and the content axis as lined out above, but I leave the measure of my success with you.
Spoilers, by the way. Just sayin'.
Now then, in Rogue One we are introduced to the character of Chirrut Îmwe that I only knew as and going ahead will be named as Blind Monk Guy. His role in the story is pretty straightforward - to remind the characters and the audience that the force is present in the setting, even if it isn't all that accessible/used by the primary cast. Darth Vader's puns notwithstanding.
Blind Monk Guy is simply the argument for keeping faith, even when its hard to see (we see what he did there) reason to be, as opposed by his bromantic opposite, Heavy Weapons Guy, who is all so edgy and nihilistic.
So, this established, where is the actual moment I'm looking in on? It's towards the end so again, spoilers:
During the battle to gain control of the transmitter, BMG is pinned in shelter with several other rebels. They need only get to the master control panel just over there to achieve their big goal, but the open space is a veritable killing field. BMG walks through the middle of the firefight, gropes his way across the panel and flips the switch they needed to switch before finally taking a hit and dying.
This scene never quite sat right with me, and I believe we can measure it through the two axis above, Technical and Content.
I'll actually start with the second. From splendid Scarlett above:
Content-wose, Blind Monk Guy's moment - is, I'd argue, quite satisfactory. Ideas of faith and destiny were his schtick and, by walking through a firefight and accomplishing the rebels' goals are accomplished and a compelling in-story argument to trust in the force et cetera is made. Suffice to say, it makes sense that BMG takes on this seeming impossible obstacle as a leap of faith, that it is him that does it, and that he does succeed (surviving having been something of a secondary consideration). Content-wise, this is all adequate.
But we don't look at stories to the same measure that the more casual audience does, and neglecting the surface value of something to only consider the deeper aspects in a story is a silliness. I do believe this disconnect between where we look is where a lot of the cases where critics and audiences disagreeing stem from.
What this means here is, the Technical axis is where we are let down. Sure, the content works, statement made and message received and all that, but lets review the same scene from the technical, filmmaking and storytelling angle:
A blind guy walks a little ways, blaster fire whizzing all around him. He fumbles with a switch and pulls it.
Yawn.
This use of the technical does not do very much of anything. Walking across the battlefield did not make me feel awed by a show of faith and the possibility of otherworldly/predestined meaningfulness, rather, I thought: stormtroopers have hit a new low of bad aim. This is silly. At its most superficial, walking isn't entertaining. And that means that, at this moment in time, the movie is tasking one axis (content) with covering for the weakness of the other (technical), which is never as strong or rewarding as both axis being independly strong and mutually complimentary at all times.
What might have been done differently? Well, the content - the theme of faith and so on doesn't need to be changed. But how do we better show it? It shouldn't be too difficult: Blind Monk Guy establishes himself as a jedi if not in actuality than certainly in the flipping out prowess department.
And that's a simplicity you might scoff at on first take: jumps and flips are more visually engaging than blind dudes walking. So let him do that: his flips and twirls. It's more visually engaging at the very least.
How might we really enforce the content of this moment though, that he truly is taking a leap of faith and not doing unnesscary motions?
I think his bow staff was an underutilzied prop. It would suit very well here. It's been BMG's tool in and bridge to the world for the duration of this movie, his weapon, his defence and his guide. If he were to parry a blaster bolt during his leap of faith and in the process destory this instrument, than that's a pretty drastic sign that there is no going back while also giving us audience a little evidence that at least some of those blaster shots are real and actual threats, as opposed to the common knowledge that stormtroopers can't shoot for shit and hit exclusively when the plot calls for them to.
Both ways, the content of the scene remains the exact same: faith, sacrifice and big toggles.
But flipping around and breaking stuff better uses the technical medium to make a scene more engaging (and appropriate for Star Wars) than boring old walking. Disarming Blind Monk Guy promises and reinforces the finality of this moment. And a stronger technical delivery I expect puts that extra shine on the content delivered.
Thanks for the thoughts, SW
I hope I've made sense.