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.