There’s a famous theory (attributed to Aristotle, though in reality the result of misinterpretations of his work made by Renaissance humanists) that a good tragedy should follow the three unities, unity of action, place, and time, or that, in other words, it should consist of one focused plot that takes place in a single setting over the course of no more than a day.
The theory is usually used in reference to drama, not fiction, and is mostly taught to high school students reading Sophocles—but it’s interesting to consider it from a fiction writer’s perspective. There is undoubtedly something powerful about a story that follows such unities, an immediacy and a focused intensity that does in fact heighten the drama. A book like The Great Gatsby gains much of its dramatic power from its focused storyline, which takes place over the course of a brief summer and in and around a certain area of New York, not necessarily a single day and a single location, but still, contained enough to give the plot the power of a Greek tragedy.
But these unities are also obviously “rules” that many fiction writers regularly break, often to achieve a different kind of power than the kind that comes from a focused story. In particular, I think it’s the unity of time that when explicitly challenged yields some of the most interesting types of novels and stories. Instead of limiting their action to a contained timespan, be it a day or a summer, some writers choose to make their stories expansive, covering the whole natural lifespan of a human being. Flaubert did this in his short story “A Simple Heart,” which follows the life of Felicité, a loyal servant, from her youth to her death. Written with Flaubert’s characteristic attention to specific detail, the story gains its power from the scope of time in covers, taking us in twenty pages trough Felicité’s simple and somewhat difficult life. Unlike the focused tragedies of Greek drama or of Gatsby, “A Simple Heart” gains its power from the length of time it covers—it’s the tragedy of seeing how contained a human life can be.
One of my professors at UC Berkeley, Charles Altieri, once made a similar point in a lecture on Middlemarch. George Eliot’s novel about the lives of a varied cast of characters in provincial England doesn’t really have a tragic conclusion—Dorothea eventually finds love and happiness, no longer the naive girl she was at the novel’s start, while various other characters also reach contended endings. But my professor was struck by the tone of the novel’s final chapter, in which Eliot summarizes away the remainder of our characters lives. In particular, he was overwhelmed by the paragraph on Lydgate, the idealistic young doctor whose marriage to the beautiful but ultimately shallow Rosamund makes him, in the end, somewhat less than happy:
Lydgate’s hair never became white. He died when he was only fifty, leaving his wife and children provided for by a heavy insurance on his life. He had gained an excellent practice, alternating, according to the season, between London and a Continental bathing-place; having written a treatise on Gout, a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side. His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do. His acquaintances thought him enviable to have so charming a wife, and nothing happened to shake their opinion. Rosamond never committed a second compromising indiscretion. She simply continued to be mild in her temper, inflexible in her judgment, disposed to admonish her husband, and able to frustrate him by stratagem. As the years went on he opposed her less and less, whence Rosamond concluded that he had learned the value of her opinion; on the other hand, she had a more thorough conviction of his talents now that he gained a good income, and instead of the threatened cage in Bride Street provided one all flowers and gilding, fit for the bird of paradise that she resembled. In brief, Lydgate was what is called a successful man. But he died prematurely of diphtheria, and Rosamond afterwards married an elderly and wealthy physician, who took kindly to her four children.
For my professor, it’s not just the fact that this character Lydgate, in whom we readers have invested our own idealistic hopes, has such an unremarkable ending (how terribly succinct and tragic are those two lines, “he had not done what he once meant to do” and it’s companion further down, “In brief, Lydgate was what is called a successful man.”)—it’s the fact that his life has an ending at all. Our own lives feel so big sometimes, and our deaths seem long lifetimes away, and many times when we read novels we feel ourselves living expanded lives, with time slowing down as we connect with characters in other worlds—yet here is George Elliot using the novel’s ability to cover large swathes of time to remind us that actually a human life can end up feeling quite short, able ultimately to be contained in the pages of a book. It’s a comment on the novel form itself, the fact that a novel has no need of Aristotelian unities such as time in order to have tragic power—that in these pages, a skilled author can make us feel the whole weight of an individual human life, from birth through death, and how tragically short it ultimately really is.
Recently, I finished reading the final book of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, and I felt something similar to what my professor described with Middlemarch. The trilogy’s three books, Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street, all published in the 1950s, follow three generations of a middle class Egyptian family from 1919 to 1944 and use their lives to reflect and comment on the social and political changes happening in early-twentieth-century Egypt, the struggle over independence and the sudden arrival of modernism, which upends so many traditions. On the one hand, the novels’ power comes from witnessing how much the central characters change, how Ahmad Abd al-Jawad transforms from a domineering and hypocritical symbol of patriarchal authority to a feeble old man who can barely leave his house, and how Kamal, his youngest son and the closest thing the novels have to a protagonist, grows from an impressionable and curious child to a bitter man of forty contemplating his own mortality as he watches his parents grow old and die.
But the trilogy’s expansive time scale gains additional power when considered against its historical backdrop. Over the course of the three books, these characters’ lives transform so thoroughly, and the world of Palace Walk, in which the father’s patriarchal authority is so complete that he forbids his daughters and wife from even leaving their house, feels like it existed a hundred years before Sugar Street, in which one of the family’s grandchildren, Ahmad, marries a young woman who works as his equal at his newspaper, the two committing to loving each other on the atheistic and anti-bourgeois socialist principles they share. And yet, it’s only 25 years between 1919 to 1944. While reading the third novel, I kept thinking that we must now be in the 1950s, only to realize a few chapters later that actually World War II had only just begun—the sheer amount of change that this family had experienced led me to imagine that the twentieth century must have been well on its way, when in fact it wasn’t even halfway done.
This then is yet another way novels can use expansive time scales that purposefully invert the Aristotelian unity of time—taking us through the course of whole human life can not only remind us how contained such lives can feel but also highlight for us how short they really are against the larger sweep of history. And it’s a rare art form that can make us feel such a thing.