6.06 Stephen King Meets Shel Silverstein: Formalism and Trope in Story

Building Story

I get it. When most of us pick up a book or poem we want to get swept up in story, in the characters and their struggles, in the images of verse and how they strike us “just so.” Certainly I felt that way about The Lord of the Rings when I first read it in middle school and about 30 times afterwards. My affection for different poets has waxed and waned over time, but I had obsessions about Elizabeth Bishop’s works, Poe of course, and more recently poets like Maggie Nelson, Robin Costa Lewis, Susan Howe, and Tyehimba Jess. There are a few writers who I will gladly pick up just about everything they choose to write: journalists and essayists like Sebastian Junger and David Shields; novelists like J.M. Coetzee and Umberto Eco.

And why do they stand out? I could say it’s because they have characters who make me weep, or that they write page-turners that I simply could not put down, but such descriptions really say little more than “I liked it” in different words. What I became interested in was not so much what they said–after all, any writer can kill off a character, write a cliff-hanger chapter ending, scream about grief or loneliness in purpled prose or semi-clever rhyme. No, most writers do very much something like this, offer us images of human suffering, human struggle, human triumph or loss, human life. So what I was interested in was not so much what they said but how they said it, that there was something in the craft of writing that made their version of it more compelling not just to me, but to millions of others. How did they do it?

And to anticipate that examination a bit, that critical reading process we’ve spent so much time on, it soon became clear that what was happening in that how wasn’t merely tools–because again, anyone could slap a rhyme or metaphor or sensory image on a description–but that those techniques themselves created and added meaning to what I was reading. Let me say this again, because while it may have been clear from how I’ve spoken about literature in past episodes, I don’t know if I’ve said it quite so plainly: we don’t study writer techniques for the sake of knowing and using techniques, but so that we can discover more meaning in what we read. Said still another way, the words of what we read have meaning, but the very structure of the story does, too, right down to the punctuation marks. In other words, some of the most important meaning in literature happens not from the story but from how the story is built, its structure and form. I’ll even go so far as to propose–since there have been 2.472 billion different boy-meets-girl love stories written–that the reason some have lasted has less to do with the story and more to do with those nuts and bolts. (*gasp*)

Romance readers, for instance, know this well. There have always been the quick throwaway reads, the old simple Harlequin romances, the older Silhouettes, and Candlelight, were mostly forgettable stories, all told with the same basic approaches or formulas. Then Avon and Zebra upped the game some along with Berkeley. Even within these there were tiers of publishing, where writers would ‘graduate’ from entry-level publishing of small disposables to more serious endeavors that literally built more into the story. Nowadays, the biggest measure of form has to do with the “steam or heat factor.” And there, too, it’s clear that writers and the readers that follow them are making conscious decisions about just how wide that bedroom door will stay open as the ‘story’ exposes itself.

One house is not the same as another. Given the same property size in the same general area, house attraction (and its price) will vary enormously by the quality and thoughtfulness of its design. Automobiles are the same way: most will get you where you want to go, I guess, but the quality of ride is a different story. And now programs and apps rely on careful strategized coding to work well. I’m not saying that art is merely a parallel to efficient engineering; but I am suggesting that we too easily overlook what so many writers are up to, missing how structure influences, changes, creates meaning.

In my poetry book Unwoven, I took this question on directly, so you’ll forgive me if I talk about it for a bit. My local writers workshop had good-naturedly been debating for some months about formal verse vs free verse, whether a sonnet or pantoum was inherently better or worse than poems without many rules. My argument was always that this choice itself was one of structure, that choosing, for instance, not to build a rhythmic and rhymed poem was an equally important approach to meaning as choosing to. It wasn’t a matter of better or worse but that all choices of structure were meaningful.

To demonstrate this, I began essentially writing a series of paired poems once in free or open form and again in formal verse–elegy, haiku, ode, cinquain, etc. to literally see how these structures affected meaning. What resulted was my book Unwoven, Poetry of Form and Release, where we can see the differences in structure on facing pages. You can find the book pretty much everywhere in online shops but also on waywordsstudio.com. There are also some interviews and samples of Unwoven on this podcast back in January 2025. 

I’m sure none of this structure talk is a surprise for most serious readers. We know when we don’t like how a writer writes, even when we don’t always identify why. We also know what we like. Less often, though, can we point at a technique and say not only that we like it or not, but that it alters what we previously understood the meaning to be. 

I’m thinking of unexpected books like Cloud Atlas or The Time-Traveler’s Wife, of course, which obviously mess with our expectations of stories told chronologically, or Life of Pi which shifts the story from reflective adventure to spiritual illumination by suspending some plot elements until its end. But these are obvious experiments. What about traditional stories? Are you telling me, Steve, that the way a sentence is arranged on page 247 might change the book’s point?

And to this, I say, yes, it could. Because–hot take here–the structure of literature is not only a critical part of a story’s plot and characters – it’s more important.

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and grab your finest hats, because we’re going to get formal in our literary talk!

From What to How

And so we move from what is said to how it is said, and this is, of course, the realm of literature study for most of its life; even Aristotle spent a fair amount of time diagnosing the essential parts of drama and what made some better than others. But no one, I suspect, has much on a group of thinkers around 100 years ago that we now call the Formalists. That is, they prioritized the form and structural parts of a story or poem as much or more than its content.

Now for some of us, this seems a bit obscene, a bit like appreciating a bouquet of roses for how chemical sugars work upon its stem and leaves. I mean, we can examine the bouquet scientifically, but isn’t the fact that it’s pretty enough? Yes and no, because the metaphor is incorrect. The flower itself is not an art form–that is, it is not a work created by a human mind with some intention. So we can appreciate its natural beauty, but we aren’t given to discover some intention in its creation. We might instead focus on the florist’s principles of bouquet design, or–to really double down–learn about ikebana, the Japanese art of floral arranging. 

So here is the difference. If the rose is the content or obvious feature we observe, how it is presented to us is something completely different. Suppose I stuff the rose into a sandwich bag and toss it on the ground in front of you. Impressed by its beauty? It’s still a rose. But then, we have an entire medieval language of flower giving rich in nuance, and arrangements with some pretty tidy rules about what is suitable for a lover, a mother, or a funeral. Don’t mix those up! Florists combine the rose with other flowers in particular forms and by fairly artistic rules. But there’s some flexibility, too. If the occasion is a wedding, I have dozens of possible combinations and arrangements that are all suitable, each speaking a slightly different mood or message than the other, though all fairly congratulatory. 

The same with story. If the plot of the story–say boy meets boy or girl meets books–is a basic romance or rose, how I put it together is a different question. At its worst, it becomes a token effort, a quick mindless read for escapism that we’ll never think about again. Some even become the rose in the sandwich bag. At its best, it becomes an art form. 

This is what intrigued the Formalists. And they themselves were gathered around a few key rules or concepts for how they understood how we might approach literature.

One of the first and most important rules–one you and I break all the time–is that the text we are reading stands alone. We are looking at how it works, not what an author says about it, what reviewers say, when and where it was published, not other works by the same writer. . . . Just the text, autonomously, by itself. Other ways of thinking about literature will include these other pieces, but the Formalists stayed on point, demanding that the text alone will give us the meanings. I talk a little more about this in the episode “Intentional Fowls and Fallacies” back in Journey 2, this idea that what happens outside of the text, including what the author believes she wrote, is not that important.

To do this, they would conduct a close reading of the poem or story. You may have heard this term before–close reading–because it is close to what most of us have learned to do in our schooling and we have practiced this a lot on this podcast. Slow down and look carefully at the text. Ask questions like, “Why this word? Why this camera angle? Why this sentence structure here?” This is an essential step, of course, for us to practice the first two steps of our reading process: What do you notice? Why is it significant?

And then there’s this big concept that we haven’t touched on in quite this way, what Russian Formalist Viktor Shlovsky called Ostranenie. Yeah, another unexpected word, so we’re going to try on a different one. We’ll call ostranenie Defamiliarization. It’s a time when we read that makes a familiar moment strange. It breaks our expectation, it forces us to see the subject differently, it shakes us from our relaxation or automatic thinking. It’s a story, for instance, told from a horse’s viewpoint that forces us to see humans through a different perspective, or it’s the Cirque du Soleil where the performers replace the traditional circus animals and perform in bizarre configurations of spectacle. It’s a hobbit, a creature that we’ve never seen before Tolkien; it’s Alice’s Wonderland, the latest music mashup, Murakami’s talking cats, or Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans. Anything that throws us off. 

Defamiliarization discombobulates us, discomforts, makes us uncertain, adds anxiety or suspense, poses questions. And it can do it through any number of techniques: in film it could be an unusual camera angle or a far too prolonged shot, a lighting technique or an actor’s odd delivery of a line. In literature, an unexpected use of punctuation or word, or point of view. Later, Jacques Derrida would describe it as the “winding of a watch:” both the watch and the literary technique set up difference, change, value, motion, presence. Ooh. Let’s just say it this way: defamiliarization in literature sets something up, alerts us to change. We should investigate it.

And finally for our Formalist concepts today, something I’ve talked about before and a lot of thinkers beyond the Formalists believe, that the best literature has a kind of Organic Unity. This is one of those qualities that makes better art and contrasts it, perhaps, to a rose in a sandwich bag (I seem to like this comparison). In a well-crafted poem or story, every part contributes to a single coherent whole, every part has a purpose, that all the parts–well-engineered–work well together to create the meaning. For us, this mirrors the final two parts of our reading process, doesn’t it? Patterns and Coherence. Where we see the parts we interpret forming a pattern of meaning and that these patterns all work together, hold together. 

Certainly a popcorn machine that also sprays feathers with the butter is not a good snack appliance; the same is true if the detective in the mystery novel speaks the language of ducks and it is never explained why. Or the mystery novel has no suspense built in; it’s written like a police report, perhaps. And this is starting to get to how we can use formalism to understand our texts better. If I’m a writer and I want to write a suspenseful murder mystery, which form is the best choice for that: a police report, a sonnet, a children’s playground rhyme, or a . . . um, mystery novel? Form itself creates meaning differently.

Okay. So we have works which stand alone, we have the close reading of those works, we know that a key thing to watch for is Defamiliarization which we’ll still talk more about, and we have this concept of organic unity or coherence. These will be our Formalism foundation moving forward, though I will apologize to the formalist adherents out there that I know folks have made lifetime investments in this approach that I’ve just slapdashed in five or six minutes, but I promise we’ll return to you another time for a more thorough look, okay?

Blueprints: Choosing Form

So as an artist, I’m making a lot of choices about how to build my work. A sculptor has to choose the material: bronze, stone, wood, mixed media . . . and each of these require special techniques and approaches themselves. A composer selects instruments and voices, keys and tempos, knowing that each presents its own tone, possibilities and limits. The same with choreography, painting, architecture, and theater. A writer, too, then, is making choices. Maybe these are largely unconscious choices after much practice, but choices they are, and they work or they do not, to achieve that writer’s goal. 

One of my friend poets has become lately enamoured of prose poetry. Another has discovered e e cummings and is learning new techniques from his works. Another is just recognizing the function of chapters for novels, how each might propel character in specific ways. 

The writer’s choices are many, but the first is probably form, the shape or structure they will write in. This is much more than being just a container (a flash fiction story, a novel of 250,000 words, a haiku)–it’s an active part of meaning-making, coming complete with its own expectations and rules for use. Within the form are limits on how a story might be told, how sentences work, what character development the form has room for. Form in this way defines the very nature of the story told.

Think about Shel Silverstein’s classic and haunting tale, The Giving Tree, that story of a young boy who makes friends with a tree and at each stage of his life, takes something different from it according to his need. The form is very simple, told in short, bare bones sentences in an often repetitive pattern. Each “gift” from the tree is marked by a clear action and a clear consequence. Even the illustrations are drawn simply, without detail. These aren’t all because it is a children’s story–many kids books work without repetition, without return after return, and have lush drawings for their images. But Silverstein’s minimalism here pushes us to think more richly: as allegory.

In a very different work, a film, the entire work is built around the isolation of a small island during a massive storm. Trapped as they are in a single space, when horror visits in the form of a murderous stranger, the setting becomes suffocating and inescapable, terrifying. It’s not just that Stephen King’s Storm of the Century is scary, but he has given himself a novel-length (or more accurate, TV miniseries length) space to keep everyone locked up tight with the evil that possesses that place. 

Is this a good point to mention that both of these stories–the children’s story and the horror film–set up a version of our Hideous Bargain story, the one described by both James and Dostoevsky? Okay. I’ll mention that here. Let’s move on.

Genre: Breaking the Unwritten Contract 

While we’re talking about formalist elements, we have to get to a kind of vicious one because it is so contentious to many in the writing and reading communities, genre. 

Now I’m not going to weigh in–at least not today–on all of the arguments for and against genre writing, for and against various genre and sub-genre, for and against various conventions and reputations of those genre: but there are many. What I want to identify here–from a formalist perspective, is that this term refers to categories of stories which are each defined by shared conventions or structural choices. I shouldn’t call my mystery novel a fantasy novel if it has no magical or supernatural or imaginative elements to it. And I shouldn’t call my high-steam romance a children’s book, most def. These shared conventions are also many and various, but I think it’s safe to say that they are shared by writer and audience. That is, if a reader picks up a novel that has the word Suspense to describe it, it darned well better be suspenseful. 

These expectations shift and change over time and between audiences, too. And, as I said, there are any number of arguments about what belongs in each genre or sub-genre category. “What? You’re calling your uptempo electronica “ambient house” music? You don’t dare!” Or, Dune can hardly be called hard science fiction when there are psychic space witches, giant worms, and retro technologies. 

But this is also a good time to point out that what was one genre yesterday may be categorized differently later and often is. All those Romantic poets back in the day did not all consider or call themselves romantics, and the modernist writers of the US certainly did not call themselves modernists. We do it after the fact, categorizing them according to what we notice of their formal structures and approaches. And most of Shakespeare’s plays and other works like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, now high classics, were in their day the “trash fiction” of the culture. Genres are always moving and shifting, just as reader expectations shift, but an interesting question for me around this is whether such shifts signal or even lead larger social change. Let’s put a pin in that question for now.

But for the formalist and others, I think it’s good to think of genre as a contract between writer and reader: readers come to have an expectation of their favorite genres. Memoirs should have authentic and memorable personal struggles and a resolution of them of some sort, mysteries come in sections of initial questions or crime followed by complication, upping the stakes with some kind of personal investment, and then a crisis where the investigator solves the crime. If you’re a reader of genre literature, you know there are more than this, but we start by thinking of genre as having this sort of unwritten but understood contractual obligation.

And then we break it. Genre stories conform to these, but better, many will play with or against them, creating twists or discomforting journeys. Importantly, the degree to which we can make those changes is limited, but–keeping in mind that defamiliarization, that ostranenie word I said you didn’t have to remember, pushing those boundaries is not only good for book sales but better for finding new variations of story and of meaning. Think of the Scream movies when they first came out, pointing out all the expectations openly. That was a fairly new twist by making the too familiar horror expectations and tropes brazen and operative. Or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which blends Victorian romance with zombie horror . . . kinda. Or one of my favorites, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, that is a coming of age story of a mythological being told through poetry and prose. What genre is that? 

Writers like Carson and Mark Z. Danielewski of House of Leaves fame attack genre with a vengeance, which itself satisfies readers who feel that any traditional writer-reader contractAlso known as the writer-reader contract. For our purposes, ... More is too limiting, that boundaries on what we write and read are prejudicial. I definitely agree with that prejudice point. And so too, we will find, does Le Guin. 

The Giving Tree primarily fits the children’s literature genre though I can name a few dozen adults I personally know who will differ; more specifically it’s a picture book or fable. It fulfills the unwritten contract of these genre, conventions of simplicity, clear moral messaging, and a focus on a single core relationship. Even so, it also works against the typical “happy ending” or straightforward moral found in many children’s books, especially through its ambiguous conclusion, which defamiliarizes the expected “lesson.” No wonder it haunts so many of us. Later on in life, we start to recognize it also as allegory, a genre where the narrative has a deeper, often moral or political, meaning.

Storm of the Century squarely fits into the horror/thriller genre, specifically a “siege” or “locked-room mystery” subgenre, but with the obvious supernatural. As ever, we see King being King and he has almost created a subgenre of his own in the field: we know we will have morally grey characters struggling to resolve their own doubts, others who are ignorant fanatics and deniers, and some outright innocents mixed in. As a screenplay and film, King can’t indulge in his signature descriptive talents, but he relies instead on sound, dialogue, to raise our hackles, along with shadows and light play, all conventions of horror films. True to the genre, each act builds suspense and raises the stakes. Unlike many horror genres, though, our villain is cordial and proper when he speaks to the town; yes he is asking a terrible price, but he’s nice about it. Somehow, that just makes it worse. And, what has become another expectation of the horror genre, the humans trapped in our town are somehow more evil than the demon they confront. King’s real evil is rarely supernatural.

We have a lot more to discuss in this area specifically around fantasy as genre, but we’ll save that for next time.

Pattern Recognition: Tropes

There was a time in my teaching past that no one knew what I was talking about when I said the word “trope.” Now it’s everywhere, it seems, this character, theme, situation, or story pattern that we see over and over again. Tropes are shortcuts for storytelling, sometimes considered part of that unwritten genre contract: the “last girl” in horror films, the young woman who falls when chased, a final chase scene, the wise old man who warns them all, the innocent child who speaks a truth, the lecherous husband, the countdown timer that reaches 1 second before the right bomb defusing wire is cut. There are thousands of them: the evil overlord, the Chosen One, the love triangle, enemies to lovers, betrayal by a friend, treasure hunts, time travel paradoxes, the cursed object, the secret billionaire, the couple’s promise one time too many that they will see each other again soon.

They bring familiarity, comfort, for so much storytelling, not just specifically to genres, but for so much literature they’ve been over-used ad nauseum, weakening any original twists or imaginative variations we might otherwise find. For Formalists, we might not just identify a trope but consider how it is used. Is it just an efficiency for the story, or is the book subverting it in some way, re-contextualizing it, or even intensifying it: in other words, does the trope provide that familiar comfort or is it destabilizing, defamiliarizing? As part of the imaginative work of a writer, a trope can be a healthy space in the reader-writer contractAlso known as the writer-reader contract. For our purposes, ... More to play; at its worst, though, it is just cliche, an overused and dully-planned dump onto the page. 

The Giving Tree has many tropes it plays with. Our tree is the martyr archetype, selflessly giving until it finally perishes. The boy, on the other side, could be seen as the ungrateful child trope, a selfish personality who takes and takes without concern for others. We have the cycle of life pattern set up as established by the boy’s life across the passage of time. And finally, not unironically for us, we have the nature as nurturing mother archetype, our tree and nature giving and giving to the human exploiter but still acting as a maternal force to provide and care for the boy. 

What’s interesting is that Silverstein does not vary these traditional tropes, but the defamiliarizing, the unsettling part, is that they are instead intensified starkly in the story and on the page–it’s practically all there is. We readers are forced to confront the implications of these traditional roles set against each other; this is no gentle pre-digested moral we’ve seen before, even though every trope is played straight. The ambiguity comes when we are forced to ask or argue  whether the tree’s giving is truly “good” or the boy’s taking is truly “bad;” that’s a formal choice that makes these tropes complex.

King’s Storm of the Century, though, plays a bit with the horror expectations. Yes, we have a devilish villain posing a horrifying choice to the trapped townspeople. It’s a ‘deal with the devil’ trope or even just the “stranger in town” trope. But as I mentioned a minute or so ago, our villain is fairly polite, terrifyingly so. He offers a seemingly “good deal,” which is why so many vote to take it.  More, the hideous bargain we’ve spoken of with James and Dostoevsky, the Suffering Child, has here a variation: first, the entire town must accept it rather than a single person’s moral choice being the only issue. The collective, public choice reveals its own terrifying truths about the townspeople, of course. And finally, Linoge, our villain, does not want to sacrifice a child or even harm it: he wants it to somehow “inherit” his role, to take over in the acts of evil that he commits, perhaps to be possessed or to be turned to an agent of evil. It isn’t clear, but this has more to do with the child’s spiritual future than its merely physical one.  King knows what he’s up to–he raises the stakes on the old “deal with the devil” trope in excruciating ways, and in so doing underscores the miseries inherent in humanity. 

Medium: The Material of Story

Now this isn’t a part of literary criticism that we often discuss, but I think it is hugely relevant and pushes on our Formalists only a little bit. I want to talk about medium, which refers to the physical or technological package where we find the story we read. Maybe it’s a printed book or an ebook, an audiobook, a film, a campfire telling, or even an RPG video game. As Marshall McLuhan told us in the 1960s, the “medium is the message.” 

Where this pushes on conventional formalism is that the approach is to focus on the text, the content itself, and media beyond the printed book were really not available in the 1920s. But it still fits: everything from typeface to book cover to paper type can fit here, from hyperlinks to film runtime. These are all compositional (or publication) choices that make up the story which reaches readers, each with strengths and weaknesses. Few were likely considered seriously in the process of story composition, but nevertheless affect the meanings: if that book cover has a handsome blond shirtless dude on it, he better be in the book. If the back cover gives away an ironic twist in the late story, that damages the crafting, breaking the organic unity we seek. If an actor choice distracts us or the movie inexplicably drags along until it reveals that it is only a Part One and the next film will arrive a year later (I’m looking at you, Wicked –and yes I blame the three-part Hobbit series, too!), readers begin to feel cheated by the structure of the storytelling. On the other hand, if we try to tell the story of Stephen King’s 8-volume Gunslinger series in a hastily drafted single film, you’re just asking for trouble, whether it’s supposed to be a sequel or not. Not even the acting chops of Idris Elba could save that.

But like all of the other choices, the choice of medium is significant. For my book Unwoven, I worried over book size, cover choice, font sizes, pagination, and how the book spine looked. For the audiobook, I chose to re-arrange the book from the print version to allow listeners to hear the endnotes along with the readings of each poem rather than save them as optional listens all the way at the end, where listeners would no longer remember what they referred to. And how the heck do you read formal poetry so that its real differences emerge, anyway? All of these were real struggles. For the ebook, just learning how to get the poems to stay formatted the same way when different readers changed the page image size was a problem, and I still don’t know if I fully succeeded for every kind of ereader out there. Put simply, the very message and intention of the book was affected by these choices and mediums.

Can we imagine The Giving Tree as an audiobook or text-only ebook? What an evaporation of its force! The picture book medium is absolutely central to its form and meaning. The simple, black-and-white line drawings are not mere illustrations; they are integral to the storytelling. The visual progression of the boy aging, the tree diminishing, and the final image of the stump, formally convey the passage of time and the emotional weight in a way that text alone does not. The interplay between the sparse text and the evocative images is a key formal property of this medium. 

And of course, the same interplay holds true for the medium of graphic novels. But while we’re at it, consider the readerly reaction to holding a contemporary graphic novel which is on large full color plates of pages in hardcover vs reading the same story packaged like a 1970s Archie’s comic. Did our expectations change?

As for King’s miniseries, know first that Storm of the Century was originally a screenplay, not a film adapted from a novel. It was written and designed for film. As I mentioned earlier, then, King had to abandon his print word techniques and strengths, but focused instead on dialogue, tight scenes, and audio-visual cues (“Give me what I want and I’ll go away”). The direct-to-screen approach creates a sustained mood of dread and isolation that the visual and auditory medium excels at, making the town’s moral struggle immediate and palpable. We are trapped with them in that city hall meeting room. King certainly could have written this as a novel on paper, but the techniques would have to be quite different, opening up internal dialogue but sacrificing those austere and claustrophobic visuals and the real-time suspense that a film creates. I can set a novel down and come back to it, off-loading the dread a bit, but a single film sitting doesn’t permit it.

Formula, Cliché, & Stereotypes: The Shadow Side of Formalism

Defamiliarization is a critical term for us as we look at the basic structures around literature. Unfortunately, not all writers or books are equally fortunate in making effective use of form, genre, tropes, or medium, let alone the finer structural points of plotting and style. Too many works today are weakened by formula, stereotypes, and cliche.

Formulas, of course, are stories built so predictably from tropes and traditional stories that they have lost all power to charm us: we’ve seen hundreds of films which do this, constantly ripping off previous movies, sequels which repeat the original film with small changes; we’ve seen books where the writer seems to “phone it in,” writing quickly and without imagination; we’ve even seen AI novels that do little but repeat what has already been out there. It’s not a mark in their favor that many readers do not notice. 

Cliches are similar, overused expressions or ideas, usually in isolation and not the larger formula-fiction of entire works. Do we really need another zombie apocalypse story now or an alien invasion story? Do we really need another comedy romance built on miscommunication? Yes, apparently we do. 

Stereotypes, too, are tired and overworked, overly simplistic characters or plot patterns that rely on automatic, unthinking recognition. Too often, they are socially harmful in their associations. The housemaid who is Filipino, the Mexican drug-dealer, the white male entrepreneur, the homeless wino. Worse, there is a movement in movies now called the “New Literalism” which is just this heavy-handed, removing ambiguity and requiring no time to interpret, thus “dumbing down” the media and art itself. If you’ve listened to any of my episodes on healthy uncertainty, you know where I am on this nonsense designed to sell movies for fast dollars.

All of these–cliches, stereotypes, formula writing–fail to “make it strange,” fail to defamiliarize our experiences. They fail. Formalists of course will critique them for a lack of imagination, for a reliance on passive rather than active perception. But there is one advantage to these dregs of storytelling: they are wide open targets for other writers to more formally use them for subversion, for satire or parody. Parodies of 50 Shades, Twilight, and Star Trek red shirts are still being made for both book and screen. 

The Giving Tree certainly avoids any of these pitfalls. It does use common tropes, but it avoids falling into cliché or formula. The ending, in particular, resists the typical saccharine resolution we see in most traditional kiddie lit. The ambiguity and lack of explicit moral prevent it from becoming a simplistic formula. The characters, while archetypes, are not stereotypes in the sense of being overly simplistic or harmful; rather, their simplicity serves the allegory, allowing readers to find larger meanings from their actions. The story’s power comes from its formal refusal to offer easy answers. Can you imagine if it ended with the boy “waking up” from his dream of aging to pull some kind of reformed Scrooge and love the tree just as it is, for what it is? 

Storm of the Century actively works against formula and cliché, opting for more complex characterizations and unsettling narrative developments that subvert our expectations. King’s narrative, while using horror tropes, focuses on the chilling human choices rather than simplistic monster tropes. The conflict they must resolve isn’t about how to kill the monster but how to answer its question. Like some of King’s best works, the monster is merely a catalyst for a terror which is already inside us.

I am reminded of the somewhat famous film ending to King’s novella The Mist. Like Storm of the Century, we have a “locked room” storefront where the humans battle each other as much as the monsters, but in the end, the real horror is the agonizing moral choice our hero must make in sacrificing his family and friends rather than turn them over to the monsters, a choice which turns out futile because, immediately after killing them but before killing himself as well, the mist clears and the cavalry arrive. Ouch.  

And spoilers, much the same happens in Storm of the Century. 

The Hideous Bargains 

I mentioned earlier that both The Giving Tree and Storm of the Century–a couple of titles that i suspect have never been talked about together—have something of that Suffering Child to them, don’t they?  

Dostoevsky’s Ivan cannot live in a world where such innocent suffering can be tolerated, and he rejects the spiritual world’s rules utterly, choosing to live in agony at the injustice. James suggests that those encountering this hideous bargain will reach a  strenuous mood of moral indignation that will reject the bargain, thus demonstrating that such a universal morality exists, so he writes.

But our stories today take us somewhere else. King’s hideous bargain is nearly identical: if the islanders wish to continue living their lives, they must allow one of their children to be taken by evil, to become a force for evil in the world. They know the consequence if they fail to bargain: they will all perish in a seeming mass suicide or vanishing. There is a lot of debate and struggle, of course, and while the strenuous mood appears here and there, most quickly succumb to the evil choice. And they give the child to the evil spirit Linoge. And they live. But it’s important to note that they do not live happily. Divorce, therapy, and suicides are common afterwards, and we are anticipating that the island town will finally collapse soon enough. No one comes out unscarred from the decision, but they made the choice. Better alive and sinful and broken than morally strong and dead. One of the details I love about this little story is that when explaining the consequence, Linoge threatens their extinction by telling them about the missing colony of Roanoke and the mysterious word carved there, “Croatoan.” He means it as a threat to push their choice, but it also tells us that some communities–not this island, but some–refuse to surrender to the evil. They walked away (or were vanished away). Nevertheless, King is not optimistic about James’s strenuous mood and seems to believe that Ivan is yelling into the wind, sincerely or not. 

Silverstein, too, visits our Sufferer idea, but he does so with a bit of a twist, as well. Here, our Giving Tree takes on the role of the innocent and vulnerable, and it suffers and suffers, giving its apples, branches, trunk, and even its stump. We feel the ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More of the line “And the tree was happy,” refusing over time to believe it with each repetition, until it is finally confirmed for us: “And the tree was happy, but not really.”  

But our boy is completely oblivious, seeming without compassion of any kind to the lonely tree and its plight. Even growing up, he becomes more, not less, demanding. His comfort, happiness, and material gain through his entire life seem completely bound up in the tree’s self-sacrifice. He survives at the cost of the tree’s health and finally its existence as a tree. The tree is sacrificed for the boy’s ease of life. 

But our boy is oblivious to all of it, unlike the beneficiaries of the other bargains we’ve read about. True, he does not consciously agree to a hideous bargain, but this does not stop him from returning to it over and over, taking in some kind of unthinking consumption or self-interest. 

Frankly, I’m not so sure which is worse–the townspeople who shamefully cave in to the bargain and suffer for it or the boy who is too ignorant to have compassion in the first place. But what I think Silverstein does most powerfully here is not give the boy the choice of the hideous bargain: he gives it to readers. The story does not allow us access to the boy’s thinking, and its very simple formal choices for its construction present readers a moral dilemma. We are made to witness the imbalance, the depletion, and whatever this idea of “happiness” is that the tree claims (mostly) to have. We cannot say at the end that the tree wanted the sacrifice: “happy . . . but not really” breaks the surface repetition, forcing us to question absolute sacrifices, absolute consumption, the bargain of relationships. 

The Giving Tree implicitly asks, “Is this kind of one-sided giving healthy? Is this kind of taking justifiable? What is the cost of such comfort?” It demands we question our unchecked desire and the ethics of our relationships with those who give unconditionally (and, as Le Guin would surely remind us, including nature’s giving). It defamiliarizes, disturbs our complacency and forces an uncomfortable contemplation of the hidden costs of comfort, making it a compelling “thought experiment” despite its unassuming form. A Formalist’s playground for discussion.

Glimpse into the Fantastic

Formalism–and particularly our consideration of form, genre, tropes, and medium–isn’t about ignoring meaning and context but attending to the craft as the primary source of meaning. Form and structure deepen our experience and understanding of story. It transforms our passive consumption into active perception and questioning, just as our reading process has already identified: Notice, Significance, Patterns, Coherence. And as I have already argued, that active engaging with what’s in front of us is a terrific response to a world saturated with superficial answers and formula responses. 

And what tools and concepts we’re picking up to carry into Le Guin’s story! And today we’ve done something else important, too. So far, we’ve looked at the Hideous Bargain from the viewpoint of a classic writer like Dostoevsky and a powerful philosopher like James. Today we added, perhaps unexpectedly, a horror movie and a children’s book into the mix. Here is the critical point: as much as form and genre and the rest matter in how they form and alter story, they do not matter at all about their ability to deliver important meaning. 

If I wanted to write a story that raises questions on the grey area of truth around love relationships, I could do it in a poetic ode, a romance novel, a literary experimental memoir, or a science fiction TV episode. Each would handle it differently, perhaps shape the meaning, but each is a suitable vehicle for those questions. In this way, formalists say, form is more important than story, plot, or character. All of those can change, but the structure of the story can carry the message. 

Why is this so important? Well, because the story we haven’t talked about yet, Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” is a story of fantasy, Le Guin’s specialty. And it is a genre frequently dismissed by literary types as frivolous and inconsequential. Even so, it is a genre rich in tropes, thickly rooted in history, and at its best it challenges some of our most entrenched beliefs. 

Next week, we look at fantasy as genre, exploring the common prejudices against it and challenging them with the questions and terms we’ve talked about today. We’ll specifically discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s powerful defense of fantasy, showing how she used these very formalist concepts. It’s time to rethink what “serious” literature and storytelling truly means.

Try it out. If you haven’t read or watched a fantasy work in a while, look around and try one on. Give that old Lord of the Rings DVD a spin, or stream Locke and Key or His Dark Materials. Or for reading, try Abercrombie’s The First Law or Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, or even Brian Jacques’s Redwall series. See what they’re up to. The most important thing is that you

Go read something.

Outro

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Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

Bibliography