Topical Guide 679
Mark Dorset
Techniques: Cinematic: Rear Screen Projection
What a Piece of Work I Am: Chapter 14:
THE NEXT DAY, the staff was summoned for a meeting. Ariane was the first to arrive. She hesitated at the entrance to the dining room. At the far edge of the room, with their backs to the bay—the bay behind them as a backdrop, like a rear-projection scene in a low-budget movie—stood Mr. Murray, Renée, and someone new, a young man, tall, in a dark double-breasted suit.
Plot
What a Piece of Work I Am: Chapter 14:
From that moment, the moment when the handsome guy looked up at them, it was apparent to everyone on the staff that things had changed. The atmosphere, style, and tone of Sunrise Cove would be different. […] She recognized him. He was the handsome guy she had waited on the night before, the one with the I-want-a-steak look. As soon as she recognized him, she wondered why she hadn’t guessed that it would be he (since we expect something like symmetry in our lives, even something like a plot).
The Canon in Miguel de Cervantes’s, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha (translated by Samuel Putnam):
“In works of fiction there should be a mating between the plot and the reader’s intelligence. They should be so written that the impossible is made to appear possible, things hard to believe being smoothed over and the mind held in suspense in such a manner as to create surprise and astonishment while at the same time they divert and entertain so that admiration and pleasure go hand in hand.”
Edward G. Seidensticker, introduction to the Vintage edition of The Tale of Genji:
We may think of the novel as the form of prose narrative in which the emphasis is upon chracterization rather than upon plot—on believable characters in believable relationships.
Tsuneari Fukuda, Words, Novels, and Drama (translated by Yasuo Nakamura)
An incident in a story does not serve its ending. First of all, there is no such thing as an ending in this world. Therefore, there is no beginning either. In short, what can be called an incident does not exist. An incident is only something which a human being has cut out of Being and named as such. This too has its existence only in the form of a word, without substance.
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