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.