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.