Recently, I taught a creative writing workshop to Transition Year students. Because Of Mice and Men is on the Junior Certificate curriculum, I reread it so I could use it as an example with them. Turns out it makes for a great masterclass on structure and beginnings in fiction. Given my current obsession with such matters, I thought I’d try to tease out its Act I, while shamelessly borrowing the disturbance and doorways language of James Scott Bell’s forensic little book, Plot and Structure in Fiction.
Steinbeck felt this novel actually represented a new genre altogether, one that ‘is neither a novel or a play but … a kind of playable novel’. But I don’t think it is a new genre. He said it uses ‘chapters instead of curtains’ but that’s kind of what I think happens in every novel, sort of (except for the exceptions that prove the rule). It’s more that the economic and elegant nature of this parable-like universal tale seems to pare back fiction itself to its very essence - a kind of blueprint for how story works.
To wildly generalise, in a typical novel, the first act takes up somewhere between the first 10,000 and 20,000 words, maybe six to ten scenes. It begins with a disturbance, which usually occurs on the first page or so and ends with the loss of the relative safety or equilibrium that defines the novel’s first act. The protagonist is pushed into the much more dangerous territory of Act II; almost always, this is a bad thing, something that they do not want.
What do I mean by disturbance? For me, it’s a bit like a stone being thrown into a pool of water. It causes ripples sure, but it must feel - for protagonist and reader - that it does not represent any kind of real threat to the status quo, to their ‘normal life’. When you throw a stone on water, those ripples soon disappear, and the surface goes flat again. This is exactly how a disturbance, which always happens very early on, should seem - we expect things to go back to normal.
Except of course they don’t. If the disturbance is A, then it leads to B, which tends to also seem fairly incidental, and yet it leads to C, and so on. Until we are led ruthlessly - because however innocuous things appear on the surface, good fiction is always ruthless - until we come to Doorway I.
So the disturbance is the catalyst, the thing that kicks things off. But it doesn’t (usually anyway) feel like that when it happens.
Of Mice and Men starts with its two main characters, Lennie and George, a couple of nomadic farm hands during the Great Depression, settling down for a night camping under the stars by a lake. The next day they start work at a new place; they are stealing a night of leisure for themselves. The precision and plainness of the detail of the descriptions here is so good:
The day was going fast now. Only the tops of the Gabilan mountains flamed with the light of the sun that had gone from the valley. A water snake slipped along the pool, its head held up like a little periscope. The reeds jerked slightly in the current. Far off toward the highway, a man shouted something, and another man shouted back. The sycamore limbs rustled under a little wind that died immediately.
Through their initial dialogue, it’s established that Lennie has a learning disability, though its specific nature is never clarified; the closest we get to that is George’s observation in a later scene that, ‘He ain’t no cuckoo … He’s dumb as hell but he ain’t crazy’. And we learn that he is thus reliant on George for his survival. That’s why, unusually for nomadic farm hands (and for fiction), they are a duo - this is a kind of dual protagonist, facilitated by an objective third person. We also see their yearning, to own their own small farm, when Lennie begs George to describe this imaginary place, where Lennie gets to keep rabbits, and there’s a stove to keep them warm in the winter months, and they ‘live off the fatta the land’. This conversation is repeated throughout the tale, a kind of ritual that they are both sustained by and that returns to poignant effect at its tragic end.
And there, woven into all of this, in the first couple pages of this vividly wrought scene, we have the disturbance: George and Lennie have been forced off the last farm they were working on, we learn, because Lennie, without intending harm, frightened a child when he went to stroke her dress, because the fabric looked soft. This is presented as something that’s not ideal but that’s also not the end of the world. There are other farms that need labourers; they’re on their way to one right now. Despite George’s concerns (which even leads him to tell Lennie to come to this exact spot if there’s any trouble at the next place), they aren’t to know that this disturbance is going to be different to any other time they’ve been forced to move on. There remains a space for hope.
Of Mice and Men is much shorter than your average novel. And so we would expect a much shorter distance between its disturbance and its doorway into Act II. And that’s what we get, with the doorway into Act II occurring in the very next scene.
Which starts with them being ushered into the bunk house of the new farm, by an old man called Candy, a fellow worker; soon after their new boss pops his head in to check them out. Despite his gruff manner and transparently suspicious attitude to Lennie, George decides he’s not the worst. But shortly after he leaves, his son Curley shows up. The expression ‘itching for a fight’ comes to mind with Curley. All insecurity and bravado, he zones in on Lennie (who is big and clearly much stronger than him). When Lennie does or says nothing remotely antagonistic, Curley’s vaguely threatening parting words are, ‘Well nex’ time you answer when you’re spoke to’. After he has left, during a meandering conversation between George, Lennie and Candy, George suddenly exclaims, ‘Look, Lennie! This here ain’t no set up. I’m scared. You gonna have trouble with that Curley guy’.
Meeting Curley was inevitable. Curley taking issue with Lennie’s evident strength was inevitable. Trouble was inevitable. Because for nomadic labourers in the Great Depression, much of how life was, was inevitable; it was things happening to you, with little choice or agency for these disenfranchised men. In this story, it makes sense that the doorway into Act II would come so soon, and that there was nothing they could do about it.
I might do another piece on the rest of Of Mice and Men, but that’s my attempt at mulling over its beginning. Completely unconnected to that, last Monday this short piece I wrote about a year I spent in Paris was broadcast on RTE Radio I’s lovely dawn slot, A Word in Edgeways. Unusually for me it wrote itself as something to be read out instead of on a page and I didn’t know it ever would see the light of day at all. So when it did and they followed it with Gary Moore’s Parisienne Walkways sung by Phil Lynott, well that was a pretty cool start to the week and I’ve been badly whistling that song ever since.