Reading for the Plot

Preface

Plot as I conceive it is the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a certain direction or intent of meaning.
Our common sense of plot - our capacity to recognize its common forms and their characteristics - derives from many sources, including no doubt the stories of our childhood.
Most of all, perhaps, it has been molded by the great 19th C narrative tradition that, in history, philosophy, and a host of other fields as well as literature, conceived certain kinds of knowledge and truth to be inherently narrative, understandable (and expoundable) only by way of sequence, in a temporal unfolding.
In the 20th C, we have become more suspicious of plots, more acutely aware of their artifice, their arbitrary relation to time and chance, though we no doubt sstill depend on elements of plotting, however ironized or parodied, more than we realize.
Psychoanalysis is a primarily narrative art, concerned with the recovery of the past through the dynamics of memory and desire.
Ultimately, we may dream of a convergence of psychoanalysis and literary criticism because we sense that there ought to be a correspondence between literary and psychic dynamics.

1. Reading for the Plot

Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semi-conscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.
At about the age of three a child begins to show the ability to put together a narrative in coherent fashion and especially to recognize narratives and to judge their well-formedness.
A narrative without at least a minimal plot would be incomprehensible.
We can make sense of such dense and seemingly chaotic texts as dreams because we use interpretive categories that enable us to reconstruct intentions and connections, to replot the dream as narrative.
From sometime in the mid 18th C through to the mid 20th C, Western societies appear to have felt an extraordinary need or desire for plots, as history replaces theology as the key discourse.
By the end of the enlightenment, there is no longer any consensus about where we are headed as a species, and no cultural cohesion around a point of fixity which allows thought and vision to transfix time. And this may explain the 19th C's obsession with questions of origin, evolution, progress, genealogy, its foregrounding of the historical narrative as par excellence the necessary mode of explanation and understanding.
With the advent of Modernism came an era of suspicion toward plot, engendered perhaps by an overelaboration of and overdependence on plots in the 19th C.
Plot is the logic and dynamic of narrative, and narrative itself a form of understanding and explanation.
Plot is conceived to be the outline or armature of the story, that which supports and organizes the rest.
Memory is the key faculty in the capacity to perceive relations of beginnings, middles, and ends though time, the shaping power of narrative.
Fabula and Sjuzet:
- Fabula (aka histoire) - the order of events referred to by the narrative. "What really happened" - but is only a mental construction that the reader derives from the sjuzet, which is all that he ever directly knows.
- Sjuzet (aka récit, discourse) - the order of events presented in the narrative discourse
Plot in fact seems to me to cut across the fabula/sjuzet distinction in that to speak of plot is to consider both story elements and their ordering.
Ricoeur - plot is "the intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in any story".
Plot might best be thought of in Barthes terms as an "overcoding of the proairetic (code of actions, voice of the empirical) by the hermeneutic (code of enigmas and answers, voice of truth).
The source of the codes for Barhtes is the déjà-lu, the already-read (and the already-written), in the writer's and reader's experience of other literature.
The reader is, in Barthes view, himself virtually a text, a composite of all that he has read, or heard read, or imagined as written.
Narrative stories depend on meanings delayed, partially filled in, stretched out.
If the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. - the "anticipation of retrospection".
The function of plot as the active repetition and reworking of story in and by discourse.
The detective story as a kind of dime-store modern version of "wisdom literature", is useful in displacing the double logic most overtly, using the plot of the inquest to find, or construct, a story of the crime which will offer just those features necessary to the thematic coherence we call a solution, while claiming, of course, that the solution has been made necessary by the crime.
The question of identity, claims Rousseau - and this is what makes him at least symbolically the incipit of modern narrative - can be thought only in narrative terms, in the effort to tell a whole life, to plot its meaning by going back over it to record its perpetual flight forward, its slippage from the fixity of definition.
Any time one goes over a moment of the past, the machine can be relied on to produce more narrative - not only differing stories of the past, but future scenarios and narratives of writing itself. There is simply no end to narrative on this model, since there is no "solution" to the "crime".

2. Narrative Desire

Plot as we have defined it is the organizing line and intention of narrative, thus perhaps best conceived as an activity, a structuring operation elicited in the reader trying to make sense of those meanings that develop only through textual and temporal succession. Plot in this view belongs to the reader's "competence", and in this performance - the reading of narrative it animates the sense-making process.
We can conceive of the reading of plot as a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text.
One could no doubt analyze the opening paragraph of most novels and emerge in each case with the image of a desire taking on shape, beginning to seek its objects, beginning to develop a textual energetics.
The specifically human faculty of ingenuity and trickery, the capability to use the mind to devise schemes to overcome superior force, becomes a basic dynamic of plot. If the giants of folktale are always stupid, it is because they stand opposed to human wit, which is seen as a capacity for leverage on the world, precisely that which overcomes inert obstacles, sets change in motion, reformulates the real.
By the 19th C, the picaro's scheming to stay alive (see Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the first picaresque novel) has typically taken a more elaborated and socially defined form: it has become ambition.
The ambitious heroes of the 19th C novel - those of Balzac, for example - may regularly be conceived as "desiring machines" whose presence in the text creates and sustains narrative movement through the forward march of desire.
The general anti-industrial and anti-technological attitude of most 19th C poets and novelists is more and more matched by a fascination with engines and forces.
With Zola, nearly every novel centers on an engine itself or else a social institution that functions as an engine.
Zola's engines - like Balzac's "devouring presses" - are a mise-en-abyme of the novel's narrative motor, an explicit statement of the inclusion within the novel of the principle of its movement.
In the motors and engines, including Eros as motor and motor as erotic, we find representations of the dynamics of the narrative text, connecting beginning and end across the middle and making of that middle - what we read through - a field of force.
What lies beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the realization of orgiastic desire: the death instinct, the drive toward extinction.
The talisman (in La Peau de chagrin) concentrates in itself and phantasmatically represents the paradoxical logic of Freud's essay: that Eros is suspended by the death instinct, the drive of living matter to return to the quiescence of the inorganic, a state prior to life.
The world not charge with desire is thus without beauty. It is also simply an impossibility.
Desire should stretch, extend, and project the self - desire as erection.
If the motor of narrative is desire, totalizing, building ever-larger units of meaning, the ultimate determinants of meaning lie at the end, and narrative desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end.
As alternative to the vouloir (desire, burning us)/ pouvoir (power, destroying us) paradox, the antique dealer offers the possibility he calls savoir, by which he means vicarious and imaginary enjoyment. Can narrative fictions offer this alternative to the logic of desire in life represented by the magic skin?
Once there is text, expression, writing, one becomes subject to the processes of desiring and dying. If narrative makes a claim to the recuperation of a savoir from the dynamic of vouloir/pouvoir, it must, I think, be of a different nature from the antique dealer's: a knowledge that is by definition always retrospective and too late, or perhaps knowledge of the too-late.
Narrative may first come to life a narration, as the inchoate intent to tell - as when Rousseau discovers in the episode of the stolen ribbon the necessity of narrative as the only way to portray an incoherent self - where telling stories becomes the only viable form of "explanation".
Desire as narrative thematic, desire as narrative motor, and desire as the very intention of narrative language and the act of telling all seem to stand in close interrelation.
Desire is inherently unsatisfied and unsatisfiable since it is linked to memory traces and seeks its realization in the hallucinatory reproduction of indestructible signs of infantile satisfaction.
Narratives portray the motors of desire that drive and consume their plots, and they also lay bare the nature of narration as a form of human desire: the need to tell as a primary human drive that seeks to seduce and to subjugate the listener, to implicate him in the thrust of a desire that can never quite speak its name - never can quite come to the point - but that insists on speaking over and over again its movement toward that name.

3. The Novel and the Guillotine, or Fathers and Sons in Le rouge et le noir

Paternity is a dominant issue in the 19th C novel, a principal embodiment of its concern with authority, legitimacy, the conflict of generations, and the transmission of wisdom (eg Turgenev's Fathers and Sons). The son most often has a choice among possible fathers from whom to inherit and in the choosing - which may entail a succession of selections and rejections - he plays out his career of initiation into a society and into history, comes to define his own authority in the interpretation and use of social (and textual) codes.
Barthes notes that the child appears to "discover" the Oedipus complex and the capacity for constructing coherent narrative at about the same stage in life.
The most fully developed narratives of the child become a man all seem to turn on the uncertainty of fatherhood, to use this uncertainty to unfold the romance of authority vested elsewhere, and to test the individual's claim to personal legitimacy within a struggle of different principles of authority.
The 19th C novel as a genre seems to be inseparable from the conflict of movement and resistance, revolution and restoration, and from the issues of authority and paternity, which provide not only the matter of the novel but also its structuring forces, the dynamic that shapes its plot.
Can illegitimacy rescue Julien Sorel from monstrosity, when throughout the novel illegitimacy has appeared the very essence of the monstrous? Is he really in an 18th C novel, "where the hero is a foundling whose aristocratic origins eventually will out?
What kind of novel is this? To what models of plot and explanation does it refer us?
Julien and Mme Rênal are living in different worlds, indeed in different novels:
- For her, the drama has to do with love and jealousy, with amorous rivalry and the possibility of adultery. She thinks she is a character in an 18th C novel of manners.
- Julien, on the contrary, is living in the world of modern narrative - post-revolutionary, post-Napoleonic - which precisely throws into question the context of manners and the novel of manners, subverts its very possibility.
Politics in Le Rouge et le noir is the unassimilable other, which is fact is all to well assimilated since it determines everything.
There is a constant threat of irruption of the political into manners, a denuding of the mechanisms governing the relations of power and of persons, an exposure of the dynamic governing history and narrative.
Julien's texts provide individual interpretations of models of behavior but no authoritative tradition of interpretation and conduct. As a result, Julien continually conceives himself as the hero of his own text, and that text as something to be created, not simply endured. He creates fictions, including fictions of the self, that motivate action. The result is often inauthenticity and error, the choice of comportments dictated by models that are inappropriate.
The relation of the narrator to Julien - and of all Stendhalian narrators to the young protagonists of his novels - is patently paternalistic, a mixture of censure and indulgence.
This obtrusive narrator, master of every consciousness in the novel, claims to demonstrate why things necessarily happened the way they did, yet inevitably he suggest the arbitrariness and contingency of every narrative turn of events, how easily it might have been otherwise.
The Stendhalian novel appears to be a self-inventing artifact.
Stendhalian time is inorganic, momentary, characterized by abruptness and discontinuity.
Julien by this point belongs to the Restoration, indeed stands as a figure of how restoration is carried out: by using politics to attain a place in a system of manners that then is used to efface politics, pretending that the way things came to be as they are (by revolution and reaction, for instance) does not belong to history, that the place of each thing, and person, in the structure of things is immutable.
The monster figures the out-of-place, the unclassifiable, the transgressive, the desiring, the seductive.
...a more general suspicion of narrative invention, which appears to be subject to interference from outside texts.
The plotted narrative is a deviance from or transgression of the normal, a state of abnormality and error, which alone is "narratable".
To frame Julien's novel within his own novel - to continue beyond the end of Julien's novel and take it to pieces - is Stendhal's way of have a plot and punishing it, of writing a novel and then chopping its head off.
To read a novel - and to write one - means to be caught up in the seductive coils of a deviance: to seduce, of course, is to lead from the straight path, to create deviance and transgression. Stendhal seduces us through Julien's story, then he denounces the seduction. With the fall of the blade of the guillotine, he puts an end to the artificiality of the plotted story.
...why Stendhal has to collapse his novels as they near their endings: the figure of the narrator as father threatens domination, threatens to offer an authorized version. He too must be guillotined.

4. Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative

Todorov elaborates a model of narrative transformation whereby plot - sjuzet, recit - is constituted in the tension of two formal categories, difference and resemblance.
"Rather than a 'coin with two faces' transformation is an operation in two directions: it affirms at once resemblance and difference; it puts time into motion and suspends it, in a single movement; it allows discourse to acquire a meaning without this meaning becoming pure information; in a word, it makes narrative possible and reveals its very definition.
The "dilatory space" of narrative, as Barthes calls it - the space of retard, postponement, error, and partial revelation - is the place of transformation: where the problems posed to and by initiatory desire are worked out and worked through.
We forget that the future wasn't yet there.
The very possibility of meaning plotted through sequence and through time depends on the anticipated structuring force of the ending: the interminable would be the meaningless, and the lack of ending would jeopardize the beginning.
The further we inquire into the problem of ends, the more it seems to compel a further inquiry into its relation to the human end. As Frank Kermode has put it, man is always "in the middest", without direct knowledge or origin or endpoint, seeking the imaginative equivalents of closure that will confer significance on experience.
Death in narrative, says Benjamin, is the "flame" at which we as readers, solitary and forlorn because cut off from meaning, warm our "shivering" lives.
Freud is talking about the very possibility of talking about life - about its very narratability.
Narrative always makes the implicit claim to be in a state of repetition, as a going over again of a ground already covered; a sjuzet repeating the fabula, as the detective retraces the tracks of the criminal.
Repetition as the movement from passivity to mastery.
Rhyme, alliteration, assonance, meter, refrain, all the mnemonic elements of literature and indeed most of its tropes are in some manner repetitions that take us beck in the text, that allow the ear, the eye, the mind to make connections, conscious or unconscious, between different textual moments, to see past and present as related and as establishing a future that will be noticeable as some variation in the pattern.
An event gains meaning by its repetition.
Repetition creates a return in the text, a doubling back. We cannot say whether this return is a return to or a return of: for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed. Repetition through this ambiguity appears to suspend temporal process or rather to subject it to an indeterminate shuttling or oscillation that binds different moments together as a middle that might turn forward or back. This inescapable middle is suggestive of the demonic: repetition and return are perverse and difficult, interrupting simple movement forward.
The instinctual is the realm of freely mobile "unbound" energy: the "primary process" where energy seeks immediate discharge, where no postponement of gratification is tolerated. It appears that it must be the "task of the higher strata of the mental apparatus to bind the instinctual excitation reaching the primary process" before the pleasure principle can assert its dominance over the psychic economy.
Repetition in all it literary manifestations may in fact work as a "binding", a binding of textual energies that allows them to be mastered by putting them into serviceable form, usable "bundles", within the energetic economy of the narrative. Serviceable form must, I think, mean perceptible form: repetition, repeat, recall, symmetry, all these journeys back in the text, returns to and returns of, that allow us to bind one textual moment to another in terms of similarity or substitution rather than mere contiguity.
Textual energy, all that is aroused into expectancy and possibility in a text, can become usable by plot only when it has been bound or formalized; It cannot otherwise be plotted in a course to significant discharge, which is what the pleasure principle is charged with doing.
The most effective or, at the least, the most challenging texts may be those that are most delayed, most highly bound, most painful.
"an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things." Instincts, which we tend to think of as a drive toward change, may rather be an expression of "the conservative nature of living things".
The organism must struggle against events (dangers) that would help it to achieve its goal too rapidly - by a kind of short-circuit.
What operates in the text through repetition is the death instinct, the drive toward the end.
Yet repetition also retards the pleasure principle's search for the gratification of discharge, which is another forward -moving drive of the text. We have a curious situation in which two principles of forward movement operate upon one another so as to create retard, a dilatory space in which pleasure can come from postponement in the knowledge that this - in the manner of forepleasure? - is a necessary approach to the true end. Both principles can indeed become dilatory, a pleasuring in and from delay, though both also in their different ways recall to us the need for end. This apparent paradox may be consubstantial with the fact that repetition can take us both back ward and forward because these terms have become reversible; the end is a time before the beginning.
Between these two moments of quiescence, plot itself stands as a kind of divergence or deviance, a postponement in the discharge which leads back to the inanimate.
The desire of the text (the desire of reading) is hence desire for the end, but desire for the end reached only through the at least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot of narrative.
The deviance of narrative from the straight line, the shortest distance between beginning and end - which would be the collapse of one into the other, of life into immediate death.
Desire reformulated as Eros thus is a large, embracing force, totalizing in intent, tending toward combination in new unities: metonymy in the search to become metaphor.
Freud: "The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness."
The whole evolution of the mental apparatus appears as a taming of the instincts so that the pleasure principle - itself tames, displaced - can appear to dominate in the complicated detour called life which leads back to death.
The organism must live in order to die in the proper manner, to die the right death. One must have the arabesque of plot in order to reach the end. One must have metonymy in order to reach metaphor.
The understanding of time, says Lukacs, the transformation of the struggle against time into a process full of interest, is the work of memory - or more precisely, we could say with Freud, of "remembering, repeating, working through." Repetition, remembering, reenactment are the ways in which we replay time, so that it may not be lost. We are thus always trying to work back through time to that transcendent home, knowing of course, that we cannot. All we can do is subvert or, perhaps better, pervert time: which is what narrative does.
Desire is the wish for the end, fulfillment, but fulfillment must be delayed so that we can understand it in relation to origin and to desire itself.

5. Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations

We have defined plot, for our purposes, as a structuring operation deployed by narratives, or activated in the reading of narratives: as the logic and syntax of those meanings that develop only through sequence and succession.
In the 19th C novel, the parentless protagonist frees an author from struggle with pre-existing authorities, allowing him to create afresh all the determinants of plot within his text.
The beginning of Great Expectations establishes Pip as an existence without a plot. He will, in the first part of the novel be in search of a plot, and the novel will recount the gradual precipitation of a sense of plot around him, the creation of portents of direction and intention.
Satis House (where Mrs Faversham lives), as the circular journeys of the wheelchair to the rhythm of the blacksmith's song "Old Clem" may best suggest, constitutes repetition without variation, pure reproduction, a collapsed metonymy where cause and effect have become identical, the same-as-same.
Education and repression operate in the novel as one form of "binding": official ways of channeling and tying up the mobile energies of life.
If we can accept the idea of a textual energetics, we can see that in any well-plotted novel the energies released and aroused in the text, especially in its early moments, will not be lost: the text is a kind of thermodynamic plenum, obeying the law of the conservation of energy (as well, no doubt, as the law of entropy).
Kierkegaard: "Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas repetition properly is repeated forwards." Freud, as we noted, considers repetition to be a form of recollection, brought into play when conscious mental rememoration has been blocked by repression.
Repetition in the text is a return, a calling back or a turning back. Repetitions are thus both returns to and returns of: for instance, returns to origins and returns of the repressed, moving us forward in Pip's journey toward elucidation, disillusion, and maturity by taking us back, as if in obsessive reminder that we cannot really move ahead until we have understood that still enigmatic past, yet ever pushing us forward, since revelation, tied to the past, belongs to the future.
Repetition as return speaks as a textual version of the death instinct, plotting the text, beyond the seeming dominance of the pleasure principle, toward its proper end, imaging this end as necessarily a time before the beginning.
One could almost derive a narratological law here: the true plot will be the most deviant.
Pip has in fact misread the plot of his life.
The scene (with Pumblechook and Hubble in the kitchen) suggests a mad proliferation of textuality, where literal and figural switch places, where any referent can serve as an interpretant, become the sign of another message, in a wild process of semiosis which seems to be anchored only insofar as all texts eventually speak of Pip himself as an unjustified presence, a presence demanding interpretation.
...a general movement in the novel toward recognition of the lack of authorship and authority in texts: textures of codes without ultimate referent or hierarchy, signs cut loose from their apparent motivation, capable of wandering toward multiple associations and of evoking messages that are entirely other, and that all speak eventually of determinative histories from the past. The original nostalgia for a founding divine word leads to a generalized scene of writing, as if the plotting self could never discover a decisive plot, but merely its own arbitrary role as plotmaker. Yet the arbitrary is itself subject to an unconscious determinant, the reproductive insistence of the past history.
The past needs to be incorporated as past within the present, mastered through the play of repetition in order for there to be an escape from repetition: in order for there to be difference, change, progress.
As Jaggers puts it to him, there is no gain to be had from knowledge. We are in the heart of darkness, and the articulation of its meaning must simply be repressed. In this novel full of mysteries and hidden connections, detective work turns out to be both necessary and useless.
Pip emerges from this scene with an acceptance of the determinative past as both determinative and as past, which prepares us for the final escape from plot.
It is with the image of a life bereft of plot, of movement and desire, that the novel most appropriately leaves u. Indeed, we have at the end what could appropriately be called a "cure" from plot, in Pip's recognition of the general forfeiture of plotting, his renunciation of any attempt to direct his life. Plot comes to resemble a diseased, fevered state of the organism caught in the machinery of a desire which must eventually be renounced.
Plot, we come to understand, was a state of abnormality or deviance, suggested thematically by its uneasy position between Newgate and Old Bailey, between criminality and the law.
The 19th C novel in general - and especially that highly symptomatic development, the detective story - regularly conceives plot as a condition of deviance and abnormality, the product of cities and social depths, of a world where récit is complot, where all stories are the result of plotting, and plotting is very much machination.
Deviance is the very condition for life to be "narratable": the state of normality is devoid of interest, energy, and the possibility for narration. In between a beginning prior to plot and an end beyond plot, the middle - the plotted text - has been in a state of error: wandering and misinterpretation.
Eros as the force that binds integers together in ever-larger wholes, totalizing, metaphoric, the desire for possession of the world and for the integration of meaning - whereas concomitantly, repetition and return have spoken of the death instinct, the drive to return to the quiescence of the inorganic, of the nontextual. Yet the repetitions, which have served to bind the various plots, both prolonging the detour and more effectively preparing the final discharge, have created that delay necessary to incorporate the past within the present and to let us understand end in relation to beginning. Through the erotics of teh text, we have inexorably been led to its end, which is precisely quiescence: a time after which is an image of the time before. We have reached the non-narratable. Adducing the argument of "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through" to that of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we perceive that repetition is a kind of remembering, and thus a way of reorganizing a story whose connective links have been obscured and lost.
One you have determined the right plot, plot is over. Plot itself is working-through.
Great Expectations is exemplary in demonstrating both the need for plot and its status as deviance, both the need for narration and the necessity to be cured from it.
Both using and subverting the systems of meaning discovered or postulated by its hero, Great Expectations exposes for its reader the very reading process itself: the way the reader goes about finding meaning in the narrative text, and the limits of that meaning as the limits of narrative.
It juxtaposes human plots - including those of the law - to external orders that render human attempts to plot, and to interpret plot, not only futile but ethically unacceptable. The greater Judgement makes human plots mere shadows.
If there is a divine masterplot for human existence, it is radically unknowable.
In the absence or silence of divine masterplots, the organization and interpretation of human plots remains as necessary as it is problematic.
We are condemned to repetition, rereading, in the knowledge that what we discover will always be that there was nothing to be discovered. Yet the process remains necessary if we are not to be caught perpetually in the "blind and thankless" existence, in the illusory middle.

6. The Mark of the Beast: Prostitution, Serialization, and Narrative

The roman-feuilleton - the serial novel running in regular installments in the daily newspaper - was an early capitalist invention that helped to create modern mass-circulation journalism.
It is characteristic of the 19th C novel, and perhaps in some degree of all narrative, which in general has precious little use for the simple, calm, and happy, since whatever moral obeisance one makes to these, they lack narrative interest.
André Gide referred to the novel as a "lawless" form.
The prostitute is pre-eminently someone with a novelistic destiny: a special, idiosyncratic form of life.
The novel tends to maintain its plots between exploration of the maximal, most daring social deviance on the one hand, and the counter-discipline of the police on the other.
One can speculate that prostitutes allowed 19th C novelists to deal with the dangerous and fearful subject of female sexuality in a manner not possible when portraying women of the upper and middle classes.
Sexuality circulates across class lines, the low and high meet, extremes converge.
The prostitute, then, stands out as the key figure and term of access to the eminently storied subword, realm of power, magic, and danger; she exemplifies the modern narratable.
Plotting as the masterful management of suspense and mystery, artfully leading the reader through an elaborate dilatory space that is always full of signs to be read, but always menaced with misreading until the very end.
The middle decades of the 19th C seemed to have an unlimited appetite for narrative.

7. Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert's Perversities

The novels of Flaubert appear to us today to mark a turning point in the history of the novel.
Any discussion of plot and the sense of plottedness needs to confront Flaubert, since his relation to traditional uses of plot can only be described as perverse. his mature work is indeed carefully structured by a systematic perversion. of plot as a central system of narrative organization and meaning. The development of perversion as a system become evident as one follows its uses from "Madame Bovary" through "L'Education sentimentale" to the unfinished "Bouvard et Pécuchet", this lsast a glorious summa of what can be done to parody and explode the ordering discourses elaborated over the ages by mankind to make sense of nature, society, and human history.
L'Education sentimentale is in fact a novel whose tenuous readability depends directly on its intertextual support, its presupposition of a certain standard novelistic mode which it resolutely refuses to endorse.
Flaubert takes on history itself as a signifying system and a sense-making discourse.
Deslauriers is a good enough reader of Balzac to have seized the essence: that the concentration of desire projected into the world as will constitutes the primum mobile of plot, leverage on circumstance, movement forward and upward. But however well he understands the system of the Balzacian novel, he is doomed to failure in the Flaubertian novel.
This is the essential point: the failed coherence of the Balzacian "system" of will, desire, and ambition produces a failure of coherence in the novelistic plot itself, a refusal of the narrative to achieve the kinds of significance that we expect from narrative arrangements of experience - or simply from narrative arrangements of discourse.
Malraux: "Flaubert's characters are often Balzac's characters conceived in the mode of failure rather than success.
The energies associated with the Romantic hero and his avatars seem to dissipate remarkably quickly in this novel, as if the steam engine had sprung leaks in its valves.
Desire here (as so often in Flaubert's novels) creates hallucinatory scenarios of its satisfaction, yet in doing so it reaches at once over and through its objects, exhausting them in the realm of the imaginary, reaching a regret for their fictive loss before their actual possession. The dynamics of ambition are lost.
The Balzacian novel is constructed precisely on a dramatic, even a theatrical model, by which will and action are plotted toward major "showdowns", scenes of confrontation in which characters act out, give full expression to the issues in conflict, and where the dramatic moment produces changed relations, a significant outcome to the problems posed. And one can legitimately argue that Balzac defines and illustrates the main tradition of the novel, the tradition as understood by Dickens, Dostoevsky, James, Proust, Hardy, Malraux, Faulkner, for instance.
Flaubert works to disappoint our expectations of drama and coherence. Culler in particular analyzes Flaubert's role as "demoralizer", his use of the twin tropes or irony and stupidity to deconstruct our usual systems for constructing meaning and significance from the elements of the novelistic world.
In the work of a "new novelist" like Alain Robbe-Grillet, the fragmentary structures of the detective story remain present in a text which does not believe in any clear truth of incident or motive to be detected, and these residual structures provide a necessary armature of readability - the signals of a possible narrative construction that are necessary to the reader's exploration of the text's redefinitions of "meaning" - so in Flaubert the model of the Balzacian novel is ever present as an "as-if", a model against which to play. The result of this play is not nothingness but an uncertain vacillation of meaning and its impossibility, a troubled search, through inadequate traditional systems of meaning , for a decision about whether any order of signs and sense could create a significant version of life and history.
L'Education sentimentale continually denies us the satisfactions of full meaning, significance, and even signification.
We as readers expect that voyages will lead somewhere, and the the voyagers who fare forth on them will make not only their goal but their experience along the way the source of significance. To be told that we are scarcely advancing, in the company of the insignificant, makes us wonder why we are to bother at all with a 500 page novel.
No longer can the reader espouse the protagonist's desire, no longer can he read in the forward-moving expectation created by the force of that desire. The binding, totalizing work of Eros seems to have reached a halt.
The experience of exclusion from the desirable world inevitably triggers in the Balzacian protagonist an intense flow of desire and its concentration on the objects invested with desirability, and almost magnetic impulsion toward their possession. To want to have is to be: the self is most typically and fully the self in a state of arousal.
The lack of an object for Frédéric's dispossessed glance points to a more general devaluation of human agency in the passage, which may be consubstantial with a lack of human desire investing the world.
The described world remains other, a world of surfaces contemplated for themselves.
The human agency within the text seems to have been set aside in favor of a recording and composing vision of a more impersonal sort which finally insists not on the human, but on the aesthetic.
...this beautiful and inhuman text.
Frédéric will enter the world of Parisian luxury without doing much of anything, remaining largely a passive agent.
What would have been the matter for several chapters of breath-taking twists and reversals in Balzac's writing here occupies under ten pages of undramatized presentation, ending with the protagonist, passive recipient of great wealth, returning to Paris to do nothing.
The erotic object - the female body - is fragmented, a corps morcelé that offers no focus and no hold for desire.
The final image of desire is passive and masochistic, offering no promise of dominion over the objects of desire, indeed no hope of his ever reuniting the fragmented parts of the body. The action of desire remains radically discontinuous; it does not work as an ordering principle; it offers no anticipation of arrest and cohesion.
"worn out, full of contradictory desires and no longer even knowing what he wanted, e felt an overwhelming sadness, a wish to die."
The very enfeeblement and contradictoriness of desire in the novel appear ever to. strip away erotic embellishments to reveal the drive toward extinction that underlies them.
James' strictures reveal a considerable failure or unwillingness to understand the anti-Balzacian, or antinovelistic, premises of Flaubert's novel, which preclude turning fascination into knowledge.
Our resistance to the label "great love story" may be motivated less by uncertainty about the status of "love" in the novel than by doubt about the status of "story". The "luminous point" that is Mme Arnoux resolutely refuses to be narrativized; it does not move, change, provoke recognition. In terms of narrative progression, it is less a luminous point than a black hole.
There is a kind of anti-principle of form at work in the novel: the principle of interference.
Systematic interference takes the forms of missed rdvs, interrupted meetings, wrong addresses, mistaken objects.
Flaubert's coincidences are carefully nonessentialized, as they are de-dramatized: they are not confrontations, but simple encounters, unfolding the narrative as something close to pure metonymy without metaphoric arrest.
Perversity - the condition of being turned around - well characterizes the curious motors and motions of this narrative plot. Desire and its objects are ever in a relation of chiasmus: you are never there where desire is to be realized; and when desire is realized, it is never in the right place or with the right person.
The novel appears to write itself in the absence of the author.
Flaubert uses style indirect libre to avoid and prevent direct attribution of what is spoken and reported, as a technique of irresponsibility.
Flaubert wished to construct a book where "there would not be a single word invented by me" - where both the entries and their definitions would be made of the sottises, the stupidities of others - and the reader would stand in the uneasy position of being uncertain whether to read it ironically or not. Thus would the dream of the perfectly disguised author be realized.
In Barthes terms, we pass from the "voice of the person" to the "voice of Science", without quite knowing it. The result, surely, is to make both notions, person and science, somewhat uncertain, and to make ideological evaluations impossible. The novel refuses to allow itself to be pinned down, to be made to declare its opinions. Like its her's desires, it exists in a mode of uncertainty and inconsistency.
We being to suspect that all action, activity itself, belongs to the world of mindless madness, of démence.
Rocks that were there at the unimaginable beginning and will be there still at the unimaginable end, create a scope for history that is beyond the reach of mind.
That the revolution ends in idiocy has to do rather with revolutionary action, and indeed with action itself, of which revolutionary action is perhaps simply the paroxystic condition. To act as if the world could be changed is the error. To act in the belief that it must change as the result of your action risks the result of idiocy. If ES claims to be the history of Flaubert's generation, it appears to pass its severest judgment on that generation's belief that change is within the grasp of human agency.
The hero begins to melt away, to lose the last vestiges of outline and shape.
One can in effect read the final scene between F and Mme Arnoux both as a great love scene and as a deconstruction thereof. The whole scene is played out in the retrospective mode, as the articulation of a sublime love that belongs to the past and indeed derives its sublimity from its pastness.
The possibility of presence, of fulfillment, provokes simultaneously desire and fear, the sense of taboo and the anticipation of disgust.
Prostitution remains profanation but is also for Flaubert somehow the inevitable response to the lies of Romantic passion, the most characteristic and even the most lucid form of love in a world where everything is subject to the marketplace.
Everything we have read in this very long novel is somehow secondary to the unrecorded moment of three years before it began.
What is to keep the narrative going? Only - we have almost reached the situation of Samuel Beckett's narrators - the act of narration itself.
ES reaches a truly melancholy paradox in the claim that the memory and narration of failed meanings is somehow in itself a matter of compelling interest.

8. Narrative Transaction and Transference

"Transaction" is of course, another word for "metaphor", as is "transference", which we shall use in a moment; all three terms image a process of substitution, cross-over, exchange.
Analysis works toward the more precise and orderly recollection of the past, no longer compulsively repeated, insistently reproduced in the present, but ordered as a retrospective narrative.
There can be a range of reasons for telling a story, from the self-interested to the altruistic.
- Seduction appears as a predominant motive, be it specifically erotic and oriented toward the capture of the other, or more nearly narcissistic, even exhibitionistic, asking for admiration and attention.
- Yet perhaps aggression is nearly as common, and of course, often inextricably linked to the erotic: a forcing of attention, a violation of the listener.
A historical shift, an increasingly acute self-consciousness about the status of narrative within art that is itself self-consciously "modern". Curiously, this intense awareness of the epistemological and linguistic problems posed by storytelling is less a discovery of Modernism than a rediscovery of a concern central to earlier fiction, particularly in the 18th C, such as "Tristram Shandy" and Diderot's "Jacques le fataliste"

9. An Unreadable Report: Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness - a detective story gone modernist: a tale of inconclusive solutions to crimes of problematic status.
Marlowe's journey is a repetition, which gains its meaning from its attachment to the prior journey. It is not primary: it attaches itself to another's story, seeking there its authority; it retraces another's path, repeats a journey already undertaken.
What stands at the heart of darkness - at the journey's end and at the core of this tale - is unsayable, extralinguistic.
Language as a system of social communication and transmission, as the medium of official biographies and readable reports, has no place for the unspeakable; it is used rather to cover up the unnameable, to reweave the seamless web of signification.
Marlowe's tale makes the darkness visible.
"it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone."
HoD does not "end"; it is a potentially interminable analysis that simply breaks off.
Any future retelling of Marlow's tale of Kurtz's story will have to be narrative in nature because there is no way to state its kernel, its wisdom, directly: this can only be approached metonymically, through a trying-out of orders, through plottings. And these will never take you there, they will only indicate where "there" might be located.
One finally needs to read HoD as act of narration even more than as narrative or as story.
Like the Ancient Mariner's Wedding Guest, he has been made to hear. If a number of 19th and 20th C narrative texts present sophisticated versions of traditional oral storytelling, it is because this gives them a way to force the reader into transferential relationship with what he may not want to see or hear.
All stories are in a state of being retold, that there are no more primary narratives.
The implicit conviction that there are no new plots, no primary stories left, only the possibility of repeating others. The sons are not free of the fathers but bound to the retracing of their traces. But yet again, the impossibility of original story, the need to retell, places the primary emphasis of the tale on the plane of narration itself, calls attention to the attempt to repeat, reconstruct, retell.
Conrad on James: "These solutions are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for which our hearts yearn, with a longing greater than the longing for the loaves and the fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be set at rest."

10. Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding

...the detective story, which claims that all action is motivated.
The figure of the detective may be seen as an inevitable product not only of the 19th C's concern with criminal deviance, but also, more simply, of its pervasive historicism, its privileging of narrative explanation, accounting for what we are through the reconstruction of how we got that way.
Freud with the Wolf Man is in a position analogous to that of the Proustian narrator in relation to his own buried past or, better, to those Faulknerian narrators who must unearth, order, make sense of the past stories of others in order to make sense of history and their own understandings of life.
The elements occupy shifting positions in relation to one another, as the story and its plotting and it must be the task of the fourth element, the writing of the case history itself, to recover the other elements in their complex interrelationship.
"forcing a structure which is itself in many dimensions "onto a 2D plane. He must manage to tell, both "at once" and "in order".
The thematic material suggested by the dream, and the associations that the dreamer is able to articulate in reviewing the dream, can only begin to make sense when narrativized, ordered as a sequence of events.
Freud readily concedes that he cannot offer a decision between them; they constitute an either/or, a moment of sequential and causal undecidability which may revise our very conception of the narrative interrelationship of event. We are faced with a recombinant potential of postures and possibly reversible chains of association. The relation between fabula and sjuzet, between event and its significant reworking, is one of suspicion and conjecture, a structure of indeterminacy which can offer only a framework of narrative possibilities rather than a clearly specifiable plot.
We know what we are because we can say where we are, and we know this because we can say where we came from. The authority of narrative derives from its capacity to speak of origins in relation to endpoints.
Freud argues that undecidability (of whether the Wolf Man's original trauma was real or phantasy) is not of importance, since the subsequent history, whether it derives from primal scene or primal phantasy, remains unchanged.
A narrative explanation that surely foresaw that much of its celebrity would come from its recovery of so spectacular a moment of origin doubles back on itself to question that origin and indeed to displace the whole question of origins, to suggest another kind of referentiality, in that all tales may lead back not so much to events as to other tales, to man as a structure of the fictions he tells about himself.
A narrative account that allows the inception of its story to be either event or fiction - that in turn opens up the potential for another story, anonymous and prehistoric - perilously destabilizes belief in explanatory histories as exhaustive accounts whose authority derives from the force of closure, from the capacity to say: here is where it began, here is what it became.
The shape of the individual and his biography becomes uncontrollable: their etiology and evolution are assigned to an unspecifiable network of event, fiction, and interpretation.
Biography, even in the form of the case history, appears to be intimate with fiction: it is a hypothetical construction.
That the Wolf Man's narrative and his very identity are bound up with the fictions he was told and read and dreamed as a child suggests a classic trope of the novelistic genre, from Cervantes on, where the hero must be disillusioned of a bookish, mystified conception of reality. What is radically modernist in Freud's narrative is that there is not and cannot be any disillusion: the self is bound in illusory relations, and the most one can hope for is some understanding of the order of relation itself, its uses as symbolic code. Freud's suggestion that the individual life history may open backward onto a phylogenetic masterplot is a further modernist gesture.
The individual, we might say, makes raids on a putative masterplot in order to remedy the insufficiencies of his own unsatisfactory plot.
Thus the way a story is ordered does not necessarily correspond to the way it works. Indeed, narrative order, sequence as a logical enchainment of actions and outcomes, must be considered less a solution than part of the problem of narrative explanation. How we narrate a life - even our own life to ourselves - is at least a double process, the attempt to incorporate within an orderly narrative the more devious, persistent, and powerful plot whose logic is dictated by desre.
Freud also recognizes that there are elements of cause and signification that can never really be narrativized at all, but must rather be understood through a structural analysis, in a mapping of a certain psychic set toward neurosis, a network analyzed with extraordinary complexity.
Narrative itself, as a mode of discourse and understanding, has only a provisional status. Its understanding work on and in time, while the unconscious remains timeless.
James: "Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so."
There is in Freud's case histories an underlying assumption that psychic health corresponds to a coherent narrative account of one's life. Marcus: "Human life is, ideally, a connected and coherent story, with all the details in explanatory place, and with everything (or as close to everything as is practically possible) accounted for, in its proper causal or other sequence. And inversely illness amounts at least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or an inadequate narrative account of oneself.
Freud and his patient together demonstrate that it is not so much simple coherence and mere plausibility that make our narratives persuasive. Narrative sequences and scenarios must accord with the complex, twisting, subversive patternings of desire. The insistent past must be allowed to write its design at the same time once attempts to unravel it. As well as having form, plots must generated force: the force that makes the connection of incidents powerful, that shapes the confused material of a life into an intentional structure that in turn generates new insights about how life can be told. The powerful fiction is that which is able to restage the complex and buried past history of desire as it covertly reconstitutes itself in the present language.
The "true" narrative lies in-between, in the process of exchange; it is the product of two discourses playing against one another, often warring with one another, working toward recognitions mutually acknowledged but internalized in different ways.
The patient comes to the analyst with a story to tell, a story that is not so much false - since it does in some manner signify the truth - as it is incomplete and untherapeutic. Its plot lacks the dynamic necessary to creating sequence and design that integrate and explain. The fuller plot constructed by the analytic work must be more dynamic, thus more useful as a shaping and connective force; above all it must be hermeneutically more forceful. It must carry the power of conviction, for its tellers and its listeners, that is the ultimate goal of storytelling. Truth, then, arises from a dialogue among a number of fabula and a number of sjuzet, stories and their possible organizations, as also between two narrators, analysand and analyst. A centerless and reversible structure, dialogue is an agency of narration that creates as it questions the narrative, and designates the field of force of the necessary fiction.

11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom!

Other novels questioning the epistemology of narrative: Ulysses, Les Faux-monnayeurs, La conscienza di Zeno, La Modification
Chronology, genealogy, and maps are traditional schemata for the ordering of time and experience from which AA markedly departs, yet by which it is also haunted, as by the force of an absence.
A given narrative weaves its individual pattern from pre-existent codes, which derive, most immediately at least, from the "already-written". The reading of a narrative then tends to decipher, to organize, to rationalize, to name in terms of codes derived from the "already read".
Barthes proairetic code concerns the logic of actions, how the completion of an action can be logically derived from its initiation, and the whole of an action seen as a complete and nameable unit, which then enters into combination with other actions, to form sequences.
The hermeneutic code concerns the questions and answers that structure a story, their suspense, partial unveiling, temporary blockage, eventual resolution, with the resultant creation of a retarding structure or dilatory space which we work through toward what is felt, in classical narrative, to be meaning revealed.
Plot, we suggested, might best be conceived as a combination of the proairetic and the hermeneutic, or better, and overcoding of them. The actions and sequences of actions of the narrative are structured into larger wholes by the play of enigma and solution: the hermeneutic acts as a large, shaping force, allowing us to sort out, to group, to see the significance of actions, to rename their sequences in terms of the significance for the narrative as a whole. We read in the suspense created by the hermeneutic code, structuring actions accoridng to its indications, restructuring as we move through partial revelations and misleading clues, moving toward the fullness of meaning provided by the saturation of the matrix of the sentence now full predicated.
There is narrative aplenty here, as throughout the novel, but inadequate grounds for narrative.
We have on the one hand plenty of narrating, and on the other at least the postulation of a story that may equal history itself. What appears to be missing is the level of plot, the result of Mr Compson's chemical operation, that comprehensible order of even that was the very substance and raison d'être of the classical narrative.
Stories are told in the name of something or someone; they are told for something. The incessant narrating of AA however, seems to bring us perilously close to narrative without motive.
There is a split and a polarization: narrating on the one hand, an epic historical story on the other, and no narrative plot or design to join them.
The novel becomes a kind of detective story where the object of investigation - the mystery - is the narrative design, or plot, itself.
We have a complex, intricate, seemingly highly motivated plot that ultimately appears to get the story of Bon and Henry all wrong.
Sutpen himself is a master-plotter, endowed with an abstract, formalist sense of what the future shape of his life must be. Yet his repeated attempts to found a genealogy do not work, no doubt because one cannot postulate the authority and outcome of a genealogy from its origin. The authority of genealogy is known only in its outcome, in its issue, using that word in all its possible senses. Sutpen attempts to write the history of the House of Sutpen prospectively, whereas history s evidently always retrospective. I have indeed argues that all narrative must, as a system of meaning, conceive of itself as essentially retrospective.
Only the sons can tell the story of the fathers. Narrative, like genealogy, is a matter of patronymics.
As narrators, narratees, and characters become compounded and interchangeable - and the narrated and the narrating occupy shifting positions - we have very nearly a literal realization of Barthes' point: the distance between telling and listening, between writing and reading, has collapsed; the reader has been freed to speak in the text, toward the creation of the text.
Narration can become fully dialogic, centerless, a transaction across what may be a referential void - gilled perhaps only with phantasies from the past - yet a transaction that creates, calls into being, a necessary hermeneutic fiction. The narrative transaction thus appears fully consonant with the psychoanalytic transference, a Zwischenreich in which narration works through and works out a narrative solution.
One need no longer worry about the "double logic" of narrative since event is merely a necessary illusion that enables the interpretive narrative discourse to further, as in the mind of some Borgesian demiurge. This in turn might imply that the ultimate subject of any narrative is its narrating, that narrative inevitably reveals itself to be a Moebius strip where we unwittingly end up on the plane from which we began. Origin and endpoint - and, perforce, , genealogy and history - are merely as-if postulations ultimately subject to the arbitrary whims of the agency of narration, and of its model in readership. Narrative plots may be no more - but of course also no less - than a variety of syntax which allows the verbal game - the dialogue, really - to go on.
Fathers and sons are perhaps the dominant thematic and structural concern and shaping force in the 19th C novel, ultimately perhaps constituting a theme and a structure incoporate with the very nature of the novel as we know it.
Is coherent understanding, the explanatory narrative plotted from origin to endpoint, possible and transmissible?
Two threads of patterning in the book:
- Incest is that which overassimilates, denies difference, creates too much sameness. If, as Levi-Strauss has claimes, it is the taboo on incest that creates the differentiated society, the attraction to incest raises the threat of the collapse of difference, loss of tension, and the stasis of desire extinguished in absolute satisfaction.
- On the other hand there is miscegenation, mixture of blood, the very trace of difference: that which overdifferentiates, creates too much difference, sets up a perpetual slippage of meaning where one cannot find any points of fixity in the signifying chain.
- Incest thus would belong to the pole of metaphor, but as static, inactive metaphor, the same-as same; whereas miscegenation would be a "wild", uncontrollable metonymy.
Narrating is an urgent function in itself, in the absence of pattern and structure, patterning and structuration remain necessary projects, dynamic intentions.
The recovery of the past - which I take to be the aim of all narrative - may not succeed in AA, if by the recovery of the past we mean its integration within the present through a coherent plot fully predicated and understood as past. Yet the attempted recovery of the past makes known the continuing history of past desire as it persists in the present, shaping the project of telling.
To speak at all is to express the desire to be recognized and heard, whether the speech is in the form of a demand or not.
AA may speak both of an unmasterable past and of a dynamic narrative present dedicated to an interminable analysis of the past. Faulkner's present is a kind of tortured utopia of unending narrative dialogue informed by desire for a "revelatory knowledge". That knowledge will never come, yet that desire never will cease to activate the telling voices.

In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot

Ends, it seems, have become difficult to achieve. In their absence, or their permanent deferral, one is condemned to playing: to concocting endgames, playing in anticipation of a terminal structuring moment of revelation that never comes, creating the space of an as-if, a fiction of finality.
We have, in a sense, become too sophisticated as readers of plot quite to believe in its orderings.
There is, in Robbe-Grillet's work a radically "constructivist" sense of narrative: the reader is asked to build a novel, not as the traditional plenum of meaning but as a possible model of narrative itself, a kind of laboratory experiment.
Narrative becomes a combinatoire: a game of putting together, a kind of generalized metonymy in which the given elements - as the given products and paradigms of culture and society - provide, as it were, the metaphoric glue.
The difference of the postmodern is, I think, one of degree: a greater explicitness in the abandonment of mimetic claims, a more overt staging of narrative's arbitrariness and lack of authority, a more open playfulness about fictionality.
If narrative indeed has to do with the recovery of the past, and more generally with the attempted rescue of meaning from passing time, the psychoanalytic model of remembering is invaluable since it reaches out to include repeating, working-through, and reconstructing - all of which seem to me to characterize the literary text and our reading of it, to define the text as read.
Plots are valuable for the use-value they give to stories, the way they make them exchangeable, transactable.