This book explores some of the ways creative and critical minds have dealt with literary plots. Plots are ways of relating incidents to one another, and critics as diverse as Vladimir Propp, Georges Polti, Sigmund Freud, and Aristotle have insisted on how few of these ways really work. I will start with a set of first principles at least as reductionist as any of theirs and then plod into the combinatorial morass where theories confront actual creation, fall, gall themselves, and, if they are very lucky, gash gold-vermillion.
Back when it was fashionable to do so, I once saw a play in which actors drew their lines from a hat before declaiming them. I’ve spent better evenings. Works that make a single point seldom entrance me even when I like the point, but this time the point was wrong too. The play set out to show the value of the aleatory, the randomness art needed if it was to imitate the universe, but it really showed through negative example that the arrangement of the action was more important than diction, spectacle, thought, music, or even character, all of which might, at least in part, survive a good shuffling. At that time, as in Aristotle’s time, each of these other elements had its advocates. Eric Bentley was asserting the importance of stage business, one of the modern equivalents of spectacle. The Irish playwrights asserted and exploited the glories of dialect, eloquence, and the other aspects of diction. The late Stalinists were sacrificing all else to correctness of thought; Eugene O’Neill was making similar sacrifices to the compellingness of his characters. Alan Lerner pronounced that, at least in musical comedy, plot was quite immaterial.
Since then, the swing of fashion has brought plot back into repute in scholarly and creative circles. Some authors make effective plots instinctively, while others have never learned, although many splendid critical minds have been describing the features common to successful literary plots for millennia, and many less impressive minds have been turning those descriptions into prescriptions.
When I started to read about literary plots, I promptly found myself in a forest of multilingual terminology where one can wander indefinitely, lost in the tangles, or entranced with the byways. I realized that the English word “plot” translates the Russian words tema, plan, fabula, and siuzhet, each of which in turn is a transliteration of a Greek, Latin, French, or other word and has several other meanings in each respective language. In English, the components of a plot are called “anecdotes,” “motifs,” “themes,” “incidents,” “episodes,” “moves,” “plots,” “subplots,” “thememes,” “functions,” “motifemes,” etc. In this book, I shall try to keep my terminology clear while confronting the same problems that have made others so inventive in the past.
Plots are purposeful arrangements of experience. In political plots, part of the experience is man-made; other parts—the rising of the moon, for example—are not, but plotters still organize relationships between them. In literary plots, even the rising of the moon is manmade, though it must either mimic moonrises that are not man-made or else introduce oddness into the plot, as the behavior of the sun does for different purposes in the biblical Book of Joshua, Plautus’s Amphitryon, and Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Both literary and political plots have purposes their authors enunciate, purposes their authors conceal, and purposes embedded in the author’s nature or past too deeply for deliberate control. The language, imagery, rules, structures, and conscious and unconscious purposes of political plots deserve continuing study, but this book will only treat literary plots. Plots deserve study at this moment because over the centuries many of the finest literary minds have raised questions about them that should be answered as completely as possible before a huge array of new questions emerges in response to the interactive possibilities that are beginning to reside in computers, with innumerable alternatives available at the click of a mouse or the touch of a keyboard button, and with vast new complexities in the relation between the audience and the author.