The Challenge

11/04/2024

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   There are many formulas for reducing fiction to the baldest of basics. Someone arrives or someone leaves; someone wants something; somebody else wishes to stop them getting it; a person is ignorant; they gain wisdom. These all describe the content of the story. A person leaves home for the first time; a person returns after years away. A person wishes to build a hospital for the poor; the rich landowner refuses the plan and wishes to build luxury housing. A person discovers they have killed their father and slept with their mother. But what about the form of the story, how does the writer make interesting any of these scenarios? A partial way of looking at this is to think about the distinction Russian formalists make between story and plot, the fabula versus the syuzhet. The fabula is seen as the raw material; the syuzhet the manner of its telling. This isn’t especially about the prose but about the structure — how a writer offers information that will keep engaged the reader of the work. Yet at the same time, we might have to acknowledge that some stories would seem more readily able to generate interest than others. No matter how poor or gifted the storyteller, anyone who tells us their house burned down the previous evening is likely to gain our immediate attention; a friend who tells us that a waiter in the cafe the previous day spilt a cup of water on a customer less so. Yet a good storyteller could make much of that spilt water and a bad one might make a hash of describing their own terrible experience, showing no skill in the telling. We wouldn’t want to exaggerate the point but modern fiction might often seem to be more about the water spillage than the house burning down, with many writers having sought to elaborate on the mundane rather than dramatise the eventful. Yet whether the writer wishes to tell an exciting story or one apparently without much tension, the fabula and syuzhet are still present. 

    And so we turn to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa’s 'The Challenge'. It is a story that would seem to have more intrinsic suspense than many a modern tale, as it concentrates on a duel between two youngish men who will fight one evening. To describe the story thus is to respect the plot, but were we to say it is about a knife fight to the death, between men apparently not so young, we would be jumping ahead of ourselves. On the second page of the story we might be surprised that the narrator, Julian, already has a child and a wife, even if the story at the beginning has informed us they have been drinking in a bar, suggesting they are at least of drinking age. We would be jumping ahead of ourselves again if we announced that the fight will be watched by the narrator’s friend’s father, Justo’s dad Leonidas. Even if we know Leonidas is there, we don’t know until the end of the story that he is Justo’s father. We would also be fast-forwarding if we started by saying the fight is between Justo, with a purple scar covering half his face, and the Gimp, who has a lame left foot. We know on the first page that Justo will be fighting, but not until the next page who will be fighting with. We might also start by saying that the Gimp never used to be an enemy but a friend of the gang. We find that out on page two when the bar owner Moses says, “he used to be your friend…”, after the narrator calls Gimp an asshole. 

     What is our point? It is that even in so ostensibly suspenseful a story as 'The Challenge', in the sort of narrative that has what would appear to have intrinsic suspense, how the tale is told isn’t unimportant. If someone were to tell us that a friend of theirs died last night in a knife fight it would gain our attention as promptly as the house burning down. But just because you can get a person’s attention that doesn’t mean you can hold it and, perhaps more importantly again, give the account a resonance. Let’s say resonance is another word for theme, and this is where we can add Milan Kundera to the formalist mix. If the formalists can see the importance of the plot in the telling of a story, Kundera is more concerned with the story and plot contained by its theme. “I compose the novel’s story; over that, I develop the themes.” he says. “The themes are worked out steadily within and by the story.” (The Art of the Novel) Telling someone your house burned down is likely to focus their attention but the way you tell it as a story will be vital to keeping them focused on what happened. If it has wider resonance it will rest on the theme the person telling the story manages to extract from it. Obviously, our poor friend who has lost their home ought not to be burdened with the added pressure of literary technique when all they might wish for is a hug. Yet imagine you are a writer trying to convey the house’s destruction to a reader. The event won’t be enough; how it is detailed will be important, and its resonances of significance too. To grab a reader is one thing, to hold a reader is another; to wonder why the reader should read this story over a different story is perhaps the most important of all, and hence the significance of the theme.

     Returning to 'The Challenge', the story is about a fight, and the plot is concerned with how the fight came about, who the characters involved are, and how Leonidas isn’t a disinterested observer but the father of Justo as well, a father who insists when the Gimp says the fight should be stopped as he continues to hurt his victim, says “Shut up and fight!” at this stage of the tale he seems no more than a troublemaker; it isn’t until the last few lines of the story that we discover who he happens to be when one of the friends says, “Don’t cry old-timer…I’ve never known anyone brave as your son.” It is one thing for a gang leader to say his underling must fight to the death, but for a father to insist his son do so might seem primally offensive, as though the fundamentally protective has given way to the hyperbolically initiative. It is all very well for a father to feel his son might have to learn a lesson, especially as it may be that Justo fights impetuously, disobeying Leonidas’s suggestions, and that he might also be an unpleasant person, with “his usual sneering mask”. However, when the lesson learnt is that he will die, that isn’t much of a useful lesson and surely one no father should be teaching his offspring.

    But what about the theme? What is the story about beyond the story it tells and the plot elements we can delineate; how does the story’s plot help us to comprehend its thematic purpose? Told differently it could have been about a bully overcome, a tale of a young man mentored by his father to overcome adversity by beating an adversary. But instead, it suggests that adversity is less about an individual one defeats than a milieu one fails to transcend. Vargas Llosa has said of his country that it was created “by the exploitation of Indians and blacks and the establishment of economic castes which have survived to this day, thus making Peru a country of immense inequalities…a society divided into a minority who enjoy the privileges of modern life, and the masses who live in ignorance and poverty.” (‘The Country of a Thousand Faces’) Here are people fighting each other when they might be better off fighting a greater and more abstract enemy; their own social conditions. But fighting takes precedence over their socio-political circumstances. Leonidas appears to have a history of violence: “Don’t think I’m so old….I’ve walked over a lot better than you” he says to the Gimp. The Gimp and the gang used to be friends, we should remember, and the gang seem to be blue-collar workers, if working at all. The narrator has to get up early the next day for his job. When Julian talks about putting on “overalls and two pullovers” as he hides his knife, we might assume these are his work clothes even if he is wearing them for a fight.

    Though almost half the story focuses on the actual fight, Vargas Llosa doesn’t create the sort of tension which demands we want one or the other fighters to win. Though Julian is our central character and a friend of his happens to be fighting, we could feel by the end of the story that though Justo has been killed, the Gimp is the more sympathetic figure. While before the fight, Justo explains how the feud developed, we might wonder if Justo is telling the truth. “We met at the Sunken Cart. I just went in to have a drink and I bump into the Gimp and his guys face to face. Get it? If the priest hadn’t stepped in, they’d have cut my throat right there.” But when the Gimp arrives for the duel, he seems quite placid, fair and reasonable. He fights according to the rules and doesn’t want to hurt Justo any more than necessary. Before the contest commences, and a spat develops between Julian and one of The Gimp’s gang, the Gimp sensibly puts an end to it by saying no more than “silence!” When Julian then goes on to describe the Gimp he does both prejudicially and semi-blindly. “In the dark, I couldn’t see but could only imagine the face armored in pimples, the skin, deep olive and beardless, the tiny pinholes of his eyes, sunken like two dots in that lump of flesh divided by the oblong bumps of his cheekbones, and his lips, thick as fingers, hanging from his chin…” Is this description or projection? Though they were formerly friends, a person can take on uglier qualities when they become your enemy.

     Vargas Llosa manages to infer this is a social problem as readily as a personal one, people from similar backgrounds taking their irritations and frustrations out on each other. Though the story doesn’t emphasise the social conditions of the characters, we can suppose that none of them is well off and that their world is an enclosed one where everyone has known each other for years and they are unlikely to escape their milieu. These are people who frequent bars, carry knives and who, if not in fear of the police, are aware that the authorities are a constant potential threat. “You want the police to come?” Julian says after his friend proposes lighting fires so that there will be enough light for the contest. 

     Yet perhaps this hasn’t quite explained the theme, though the milieu helps do so. These are men who define their masculinity through violence, who see, as Conor Friedersdorf notes, while looking at other cultural modes and especially victimhood culture, that “in honor cultures like the Old West or the street gangs of West Side Story, they might engage in a duel or physical fight” (The Atlantic). But what Vargas Llosa does is show an honour culture within the context of characters who from a sociological perspective might be deemed victims. He doesn’t rob the characters of their agency but he keeps enough distance from the identificatory tension in the story for us to muse over issues greater than who will win the fight. When it is revealed at the end that Leonidas is Justo’s father, it makes us aware how brutally honour-focused this environment happens to be, and how people's death can be so futile, potentially generation after generation. 

       In a fine piece by Gary Younge, looking at knife culture in the UK, and especially in England, Younge wonders whether knife violence should be seen as a problem of the individual or more a problem of social health; rather than emphasising tough sentencing, better perhaps to look at social opportunity and healthier mental attitudes. “A public health approach does not deny that policing has a role” he says, “but it regards law enforcement as just one part of a broader, more holistic programme of intervention.” (Guardian) Let us not claim Vargas Llosa’s story is a sociological examination of a problem; yet in its telling, it clearly wants to be more than a story about rival gangs with a clear winner and loser. It wonders too that if everybody in such a culture might be losers. It asks us to step back from the story and look at its themes of generational aggression, the desire for a son to live up to his father, and how friendship can be more goading than nurturing in certain environments. Maybe none of these aspects would have become prominent were we chiefly focused on someone who, in common parlance, wants to whip the Gimp’s ass. Someone who opened a story by telling us this, maybe wouldn’t care about the plot, wishing quickly to tell the story's highlights. They would potentially be derelict in their narrative duty or capable of getting straight to the point. But someone who tells it with a fuller awareness of its place in a broader cultural milieu might just have grasped also its theme.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Challenge

   There are many formulas for reducing fiction to the baldest of basics. Someone arrives or someone leaves; someone wants something; somebody else wishes to stop them getting it; a person is ignorant; they gain wisdom. These all describe the content of the story. A person leaves home for the first time; a person returns after years away. A person wishes to build a hospital for the poor; the rich landowner refuses the plan and wishes to build luxury housing. A person discovers they have killed their father and slept with their mother. But what about the form of the story, how does the writer make interesting any of these scenarios? A partial way of looking at this is to think about the distinction Russian formalists make between story and plot, the fabula versus the syuzhet. The fabula is seen as the raw material; the syuzhet the manner of its telling. This isn’t especially about the prose but about the structure — how a writer offers information that will keep engaged the reader of the work. Yet at the same time, we might have to acknowledge that some stories would seem more readily able to generate interest than others. No matter how poor or gifted the storyteller, anyone who tells us their house burned down the previous evening is likely to gain our immediate attention; a friend who tells us that a waiter in the cafe the previous day spilt a cup of water on a customer less so. Yet a good storyteller could make much of that spilt water and a bad one might make a hash of describing their own terrible experience, showing no skill in the telling. We wouldn’t want to exaggerate the point but modern fiction might often seem to be more about the water spillage than the house burning down, with many writers having sought to elaborate on the mundane rather than dramatise the eventful. Yet whether the writer wishes to tell an exciting story or one apparently without much tension, the fabula and syuzhet are still present. 

    And so we turn to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa’s 'The Challenge'. It is a story that would seem to have more intrinsic suspense than many a modern tale, as it concentrates on a duel between two youngish men who will fight one evening. To describe the story thus is to respect the plot, but were we to say it is about a knife fight to the death, between men apparently not so young, we would be jumping ahead of ourselves. On the second page of the story we might be surprised that the narrator, Julian, already has a child and a wife, even if the story at the beginning has informed us they have been drinking in a bar, suggesting they are at least of drinking age. We would be jumping ahead of ourselves again if we announced that the fight will be watched by the narrator’s friend’s father, Justo’s dad Leonidas. Even if we know Leonidas is there, we don’t know until the end of the story that he is Justo’s father. We would also be fast-forwarding if we started by saying the fight is between Justo, with a purple scar covering half his face, and the Gimp, who has a lame left foot. We know on the first page that Justo will be fighting, but not until the next page who will be fighting with. We might also start by saying that the Gimp never used to be an enemy but a friend of the gang. We find that out on page two when the bar owner Moses says, “he used to be your friend…”, after the narrator calls Gimp an asshole. 

     What is our point? It is that even in so ostensibly suspenseful a story as 'The Challenge', in the sort of narrative that has what would appear to have intrinsic suspense, how the tale is told isn’t unimportant. If someone were to tell us that a friend of theirs died last night in a knife fight it would gain our attention as promptly as the house burning down. But just because you can get a person’s attention that doesn’t mean you can hold it and, perhaps more importantly again, give the account a resonance. Let’s say resonance is another word for theme, and this is where we can add Milan Kundera to the formalist mix. If the formalists can see the importance of the plot in the telling of a story, Kundera is more concerned with the story and plot contained by its theme. “I compose the novel’s story; over that, I develop the themes.” he says. “The themes are worked out steadily within and by the story.” (The Art of the Novel) Telling someone your house burned down is likely to focus their attention but the way you tell it as a story will be vital to keeping them focused on what happened. If it has wider resonance it will rest on the theme the person telling the story manages to extract from it. Obviously, our poor friend who has lost their home ought not to be burdened with the added pressure of literary technique when all they might wish for is a hug. Yet imagine you are a writer trying to convey the house’s destruction to a reader. The event won’t be enough; how it is detailed will be important, and its resonances of significance too. To grab a reader is one thing, to hold a reader is another; to wonder why the reader should read this story over a different story is perhaps the most important of all, and hence the significance of the theme.

     Returning to 'The Challenge', the story is about a fight, and the plot is concerned with how the fight came about, who the characters involved are, and how Leonidas isn’t a disinterested observer but the father of Justo as well, a father who insists when the Gimp says the fight should be stopped as he continues to hurt his victim, says “Shut up and fight!” at this stage of the tale he seems no more than a troublemaker; it isn’t until the last few lines of the story that we discover who he happens to be when one of the friends says, “Don’t cry old-timer…I’ve never known anyone brave as your son.” It is one thing for a gang leader to say his underling must fight to the death, but for a father to insist his son do so might seem primally offensive, as though the fundamentally protective has given way to the hyperbolically initiative. It is all very well for a father to feel his son might have to learn a lesson, especially as it may be that Justo fights impetuously, disobeying Leonidas’s suggestions, and that he might also be an unpleasant person, with “his usual sneering mask”. However, when the lesson learnt is that he will die, that isn’t much of a useful lesson and surely one no father should be teaching his offspring.

    But what about the theme? What is the story about beyond the story it tells and the plot elements we can delineate; how does the story’s plot help us to comprehend its thematic purpose? Told differently it could have been about a bully overcome, a tale of a young man mentored by his father to overcome adversity by beating an adversary. But instead, it suggests that adversity is less about an individual one defeats than a milieu one fails to transcend. Vargas Llosa has said of his country that it was created “by the exploitation of Indians and blacks and the establishment of economic castes which have survived to this day, thus making Peru a country of immense inequalities…a society divided into a minority who enjoy the privileges of modern life, and the masses who live in ignorance and poverty.” (‘The Country of a Thousand Faces’) Here are people fighting each other when they might be better off fighting a greater and more abstract enemy; their own social conditions. But fighting takes precedence over their socio-political circumstances. Leonidas appears to have a history of violence: “Don’t think I’m so old….I’ve walked over a lot better than you” he says to the Gimp. The Gimp and the gang used to be friends, we should remember, and the gang seem to be blue-collar workers, if working at all. The narrator has to get up early the next day for his job. When Julian talks about putting on “overalls and two pullovers” as he hides his knife, we might assume these are his work clothes even if he is wearing them for a fight.

    Though almost half the story focuses on the actual fight, Vargas Llosa doesn’t create the sort of tension which demands we want one or the other fighters to win. Though Julian is our central character and a friend of his happens to be fighting, we could feel by the end of the story that though Justo has been killed, the Gimp is the more sympathetic figure. While before the fight, Justo explains how the feud developed, we might wonder if Justo is telling the truth. “We met at the Sunken Cart. I just went in to have a drink and I bump into the Gimp and his guys face to face. Get it? If the priest hadn’t stepped in, they’d have cut my throat right there.” But when the Gimp arrives for the duel, he seems quite placid, fair and reasonable. He fights according to the rules and doesn’t want to hurt Justo any more than necessary. Before the contest commences, and a spat develops between Julian and one of The Gimp’s gang, the Gimp sensibly puts an end to it by saying no more than “silence!” When Julian then goes on to describe the Gimp he does both prejudicially and semi-blindly. “In the dark, I couldn’t see but could only imagine the face armored in pimples, the skin, deep olive and beardless, the tiny pinholes of his eyes, sunken like two dots in that lump of flesh divided by the oblong bumps of his cheekbones, and his lips, thick as fingers, hanging from his chin…” Is this description or projection? Though they were formerly friends, a person can take on uglier qualities when they become your enemy.

     Vargas Llosa manages to infer this is a social problem as readily as a personal one, people from similar backgrounds taking their irritations and frustrations out on each other. Though the story doesn’t emphasise the social conditions of the characters, we can suppose that none of them is well off and that their world is an enclosed one where everyone has known each other for years and they are unlikely to escape their milieu. These are people who frequent bars, carry knives and who, if not in fear of the police, are aware that the authorities are a constant potential threat. “You want the police to come?” Julian says after his friend proposes lighting fires so that there will be enough light for the contest. 

     Yet perhaps this hasn’t quite explained the theme, though the milieu helps do so. These are men who define their masculinity through violence, who see, as Conor Friedersdorf notes, while looking at other cultural modes and especially victimhood culture, that “in honor cultures like the Old West or the street gangs of West Side Story, they might engage in a duel or physical fight” (The Atlantic). But what Vargas Llosa does is show an honour culture within the context of characters who from a sociological perspective might be deemed victims. He doesn’t rob the characters of their agency but he keeps enough distance from the identificatory tension in the story for us to muse over issues greater than who will win the fight. When it is revealed at the end that Leonidas is Justo’s father, it makes us aware how brutally honour-focused this environment happens to be, and how people's death can be so futile, potentially generation after generation. 

       In a fine piece by Gary Younge, looking at knife culture in the UK, and especially in England, Younge wonders whether knife violence should be seen as a problem of the individual or more a problem of social health; rather than emphasising tough sentencing, better perhaps to look at social opportunity and healthier mental attitudes. “A public health approach does not deny that policing has a role” he says, “but it regards law enforcement as just one part of a broader, more holistic programme of intervention.” (Guardian) Let us not claim Vargas Llosa’s story is a sociological examination of a problem; yet in its telling, it clearly wants to be more than a story about rival gangs with a clear winner and loser. It wonders too that if everybody in such a culture might be losers. It asks us to step back from the story and look at its themes of generational aggression, the desire for a son to live up to his father, and how friendship can be more goading than nurturing in certain environments. Maybe none of these aspects would have become prominent were we chiefly focused on someone who, in common parlance, wants to whip the Gimp’s ass. Someone who opened a story by telling us this, maybe wouldn’t care about the plot, wishing quickly to tell the story's highlights. They would potentially be derelict in their narrative duty or capable of getting straight to the point. But someone who tells it with a fuller awareness of its place in a broader cultural milieu might just have grasped also its theme.


© Tony McKibbin