CONFLICT - THE CHAOS THAT REVEALS
Just finished the ecstatic second season of Interview with the Vampire, a series I cannot recommend enough for anyone interested in excellent TV and excellent storytelling. But because I’m a story nerd, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the character of Lestat and how, structurally, Lestat is a model par excellence for the Conflict mechanic in traditional storytelling.
As we’ve discussed previously, Conflict is the mainspring of traditional storytelling. Conflict propels the narrative, propels the characters and propels, through its profluencies, the readers. All lives are marked by conflicts, big and small (what I call Conflictuality), but the Conflict mechanic is more than just a hypertonic trial or problem; Conflict possesses important formal dimensions —