by Joseph Sale
When we think of creating our fictional worlds, we tend to think in terms of landscapes, maps, these two-dimensional planes of existence. However, whilst this can be useful for creating scope – lots of characters and a wide, wide world to explore, a feeling of breadth – it is less useful for creating depth.
Function follows form, and so when we create literally “deep” worlds, we also create symbolically deep ones. The best example of this in classical literature is, of course, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which sees a perilous descent through the Nine Circles of Hell, then an upward ascent of the mountain of Purgatory, and finally a flight into the Spheres of Heaven.
… understanding that stories should not only move along but also upward and downward along a vertical axis is pivotal to creating psychological and symbolic depth.
There are many reasons why this structure – vertical rather than horizontal – works at such a profound level. An obvious one is that our own consciousness seems to function this way. We sit at a conscious level most of the time, but when we dream or enter trances, we enter a subconscious state, a lower level, where intuition and creativity and more primordial forces hold sway. Beneath even that is the pure chaos of the unconscious, the maelstrom of desires and shared human memory.
One can easily map Dante’s tripartite tiers to the levels of consciousness. Hell is unconscious, roiling in its own filth and destruction, without any self-awareness. Purgatory is sub-conscious. There is a level of awareness, of self-insight, and the desires and energies of the unconscious have been filtered and harnessed towards progress here. Lastly, in Heaven, we are fully conscious – aware of ourselves and self-actualised.
This is only a cursory overview, but already we can see how deeply this system appeals to our natural psychology and spirituality. Most authors focus on lateral, horizontal movement – going from A to B. But in reality, stories should not only move from A to B, but also from the ground floor to the basement, and from the basement all the way upwards to the first storey.
To give contemporary examples of what I mean, we can look at two masterclasses in vertical storytelling. The first is The City by S. C. Mendes, published by the amazing folks at Blood Bound Books. This incredible novel is set in the 1910s, and revolves around a detective, Max Elliot; he wants to quit the force, but a gruesome murder reminiscent of one that went unsolved long years ago – a personal tragedy that broke Max, but which he now has a shot at gaining closure on with this new case – pulls him back in. In trying to solve this murder, Max discovers an occult secret at the heart of San Francisco, which leads him down a path of profane knowledge, and to a city deep underground.
Without giving too much away, not only is there a literal element of verticality in this storytelling (we must descend to reach The City), but there is also a figurative element, in that Max discovers the realities of what is lying beneath what we think we know – which includes traditional notions of morality. His descent into the eponymous City ultimately leads him to confront unimaginable degradations, horrors, and ritualistic “sins”.
There is more than a little sense of plummeting down Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell here, as each successive horror becomes more extreme, disturbing, and perverse. This gives the sense that we are not simply exploring a physical landscape, but the psyche of our own hero Max Elliot (who has seen horror in his time on the force, too), or, indeed, of the human race. What I loved about Mendes’ work is that it did not feel like I was being titillated with violence (the gore-porn that so often substitutes actual horror), but rather that there was coded symbolism in the violence that represented something deeper for our character, the wider plot, and indeed the human condition.
Most authors focus on lateral, horizontal movement – going from A to B. But in reality, stories should not only move from A to B, but also from the ground floor to the basement, and from the basement all the way upwards to the first storey.
This secret underground city is populated by mysterious lizard-people who predate humankind by quite some way; these symbolically seem to represent the cold, unfeeling reptilian part of the human brain – where there is only desire, fulfilment of those desires, and repetition. This reptilian part of the brain lies buried deep within us, but it is still there, regulating our unconscious breathing and prompting our need to eat, have sex, and sleep. This part of us knows nothing of societal norms – or perhaps obeys its own norms which we have become unfamiliar with – and so it is with the lizards of The City. In some sense, the lizard-people may represent a regression into an older – and perhaps more potent – form of being.
Certainly it seems that the ancient peoples, and even the early moderns, had far more of an affinity with sex and violence than we do. Our tastes seem ultimately voyeuristic and sterile by comparison with the blood-sacrifices of the Aztecs, the Bacchanalia of the Greeks, the gladiatorial games of Rome, or even the gruesome executions of the Elizabethans. This leads me nicely onto another aspect of “verticality” in fiction: our relationship with time.
In Will Shakespeare Die? by Gordon James, a title released by The Writing Collective in 2020, the verticality is almost entirely metaphorical. It is the past which is the murky basement, the lower level of hell, into which we must descend to learn the truth. In Will Shakespeare Die? the story unfolds over two timelines: the 1980s and Elizabethan England. In the ‘80s, Kit Morton and Thom Davenant are desperately trying to salvage the disastrous development of The Play, a theatrical production about Shakespeare’s life; to do this, Morton resorts to occult means.
In Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare also calls on occult magic to see how his story ends, whilst trying to thwart hidden forces closing in on him. Whilst the scenes in the relative “modern day” of the ‘80s are grim, it is the past which proves the true lower level of hell only accessible by means of magical incantation:
“Now with speed he poured more incense in, extinguished the altar lights, sat kneeling toward the triangle of manifestation upon the floor, crossing his arms upon his breast in a crossbones symbol. In the complete darkness he closes his eyes and repeated and repeated: ‘Allay Fortission, Fortissio, Allynsen Roa!’ Then nothing, except he alone in the profound quiet, waiting. ‘I greet you,’ he said, eyes still closed. ‘I greet you.’ The incense seemed to swirl around him, thick currents, sticky as treacle, but charred beyond sweetness. He felt like a man drowning…”
If we construe our consciousness as layers, built up over time, not only through our own experiences, but through the genetic memory passed down through DNA, then the past is a perfect cipher for the unconscious, the deep dreamworld we occasionally are granted access to via moments of clarity, insight, or illumination.
Clive Barker once wrote in his The Great and Secret Show that we access the dream-sea (which he calls “Quiddity”) three times during our life: when we’re born, when we fall in love with our soulmate, and when we die. I do not know if Gordon James has read much Clive Barker, but his story weirdly imitates this structure, as we enter the past only at moments of magical rebirth, intense love, or at the moment before death.
The strangeness of Will Shakespeare Die? is that this portal is double-sided, and whilst our modern characters are going down into the lower depths of “the past” and hell – Shakespeare’s secret England – our Shakespearean cast are visiting, or rather visioning, the 1980s. To them, the future is the dream-sea, an ineffable realm they are trying to ascend towards, but lack the means to fully do so.
I think there is a profound truth in this. When we get lost in looking backwards, trapped in the past, regressing, we are in a form of hell, and interestingly the redemptive notes only begin to creep into the novel when our ‘80s cast realise that they still have time to create a future for themselves, to look forward (or upwards, to extend the metaphor).
As you can see, understanding that stories should not only move along but also upward and downward along a vertical axis is pivotal to creating psychological and symbolic depth. Many writers neglect this aspect of storytelling to their detriment. There are many lessons to be learned from reading S. C. Mendes and Gordon James, and from exploring what the concept of “verticality” means in our own writing.
Mentioned Works
S. C. Mendes
Gordon James
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Totally intriguing article and love the Dante reference. I have recently had accepted a 3000 word article on Dante (for his 700 anniversary in September when it will be published) for the St Austin Review in the USA. And this is a point – verticality – I make about Dante in contradistinction to Homer where we are travelling from horizontally across the Mediterranean basically. It is fascinating to see how writers play with this and how it can be used. I just read some of these books – and return to Barker whom I’ve not read in years! Thanks.