The Past is Prologue (Personas, Pt. 1)

‘Perfection is the enemy of perfectly adequate.’

Better Call Saul

The narrative of a story is a tricky subject that challenges every writer. How does one capture the real world on the written word, let alone a fictional one? While there are many attributes to every narrative, some are more high-profile than others. Detail, for instance, is easy to identify. Some stories use excessive amounts of detail, while others are rather sparse. No one is going to overlook the discussion of particulars in general.

Likewise, the verbiage is another high-profile part of the narrative. Quotation marks leave little to the imagination, highlighting the verbal logue that is occurring. Nonetheless, both of these narrative attributes come short in capturing a major aspect that can easily be overlooked: the personas of the characters. The observation of personas is far more subtle and difficult to qualify, their reach stretching beyond the written page.

Without getting too technical, a persona is a face a person puts forth for society. True or false, real or fake, personas exist for everyone whether they like it or not. While the soul is the infrastructure of a person, it is often difficult to discern and rarely seen if ever. In contrast, the persona is in many ways the superstructure that really holds a person together. While the phrase “what you eat is what you are” certainly has some truth to it, it pales in comparison to the idiom “fake it until you make it.” One could make the case that all of life is one big attempt to fake it until making it!

In fact, the word “hypocrite” is essentially derived from an ancient Greek actor putting on a mask that would serve as a persona. While this idea is interesting enough in the individualized abstract, it explodes in a thousand directions when applied to a specific society as a whole. Suddenly everyone in the room becomes much more complicated, as each person is playing a role both of their own making and of those around them. In many ways, the intersections of humanity are far more perpendicular than parallel, as we bounce off one another more than we walk side by side.

We belong to a Mystery far grander than our little selves and our little time. Great storytellers and spiritual teachers always know this.

Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

So how do we penetrate personas and accurately capture them? Is it even possible in a literary fictional sense? I would argue while it is difficult, it is indeed feasible. To do this, however, a writer has to be expansive in their viewpoint, looking beyond a certain moment in time. Past, present, and future must all be taken into account, especially the select moments (kairos) in the greater timeline (chronos) of life. As Richard Rohr references, we also must go beyond the granular to the grandeur of the Mystery of our existence.

The other major aspect that runs besides this is the story’s logue. Essentially, logue denotes a compilation of discourse in all of its forms: prologue, monologue, dialogue, etc. To put it another way, logue is the totality of recorded human interaction as best as we can see it (i.e. logic or logos). In a fictional literary work, this is essentially the greater narrative as it relates to all of its combined aspects like detail and verbiage.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.

Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

Linking this to time and character, the past is a prologue as it details where a persona has come from. A prologue serves as the foundation for an entire story, essentially providing the stage on which all personas parade across. In many ways, the past transcends time as it impacts the present and the future, at least when it is remembered and acted on. A skilled writer can capture such logue, integrating it into the greater narrative and specifically linking it to characters and their personas.

The excellent TV show Better Call Saul captures this concept perfectly, alternating between two different times in the life of the lawyer Saul Goodman. Every opening scene of the season focuses on the gloomy future of the man formerly known as Saul (after the events of the show Breaking Bad), then travels back to the past to his glorious heyday. While future Saul has changed his name and has adopted an entirely new persona, his past prologue has never left him entirely. Step by step, the audience sees Saul’s successes and failures, his magnetic charisma slowly leading to a downfall already revealed.

While the future blog posts of this series will tackle the aspects of present/future and monologue/dialogue as they relate to personas, these aspects are by no means excluded from the past and prologue. One of the great mysteries of life is the relativity of time, which is often a reoccurring plot point in storytelling. Storytelling and the personas within transcend time itself, encompassing far more than what the ticking of a clock can quantify. Ideally, the summation of logue is linked together in a cohesive fashion that feels just right regardless of the past, present, or future.

Next time, we will discuss those pesky monologuing thoughts in your head that constitute the present persona!