Like many philosophical definitions, Aristotle’s definition of a plot as the relationship among the incidents leaves us with two words to explore instead of the one we started with. What is a “relationship,” and what is an “incident”? This chapter and the next will discuss the first of these questions. Let us begin with a relatively simple question: where do such relationships exist?
To answer this question, I need to offer my own definitions for two favorite terms of the Russian Formalist critics in the 1920s, fabula and siuzhet. Unlike the French Structuralists, who contributed invaluable terminological precision to the Slavic discoveries of an earlier generation, the Formalists lacked the time and probably the analytical inclination to worry very much about terminology. Boris Tomashevsky, the fiercest of these Leningrad scholars, warns us that in criticism “the terms fabula and siuzhet are used with the most diverse meanings, sometimes the direct opposite of the way I use them here” (134). For the purposes of this study, the best translation for fabula is “plot” and the best translation for siuzhet is also “plot.” In both cases, the plot can be defined as the relationship among the incidents, but these two sets of relationships exist in two different worlds. The fabula is the relationship among the incidents in the world the characters inhabit, a multidimensional, intricately interconnected array where events may happen simultaneously in different places, where causation plays a crucial structural role, and where sequences of events exist in the time system of the characters’ lives. The siuzhet is the relationship among the same incidents in the world of the text, a one-dimensional array of words encountered one after another in the time system of the reader.
To some, this pair of terms comes close to the classical terms of rhetoric, inventio and dispositio, the first designating the discovery of the raw literary material, often in literary or other sources, and the second the way the author organizes that material in the new text. This terminology presumes that authors start with content and then impose form upon it. Rhetoricians have made this assumption in many periods of history, but it fell out of fashion about a century ago as literary thinkers became conscious that formal decisions like “I need a surprise ending” often preceded the selection of particular content to put at the end. The more sophisticated view, as expressed by Benedetto Croce and others, is that form is inseparable from content. This view works well for most literature, but we have already discussed how the material for translations and summaries does have a separate anterior existence.
Other scholars have linked the fabula with Ferdinand de Saussure’s “signified” and the siuzhet with his “signifier,” or associated the two with the deep and surface structures Noam Chomsky describes in his Cartesian Linguistics and elsewhere. These pairs of words from discourse about signs and sentences share one paradox with the fabula–siuzhet pair: in all three, each element is logically prior to the other, depending upon one’s point of view. The reader can come to know the fabula only through the siuzhet, and the author cannot imagine a siuzhet without some fabula to express; an account has to be of something. In small forms, like fairy tales, these two kinds of plot tend to track one another rather closely, but in larger forms, like epics or novels, they often diverge. In the siuzhet of the Odyssey, for example, Odysseus’s meeting with Nausicaa precedes his meeting with Polyphemus the Cyclops. In the fabula, Odysseus meets Polyphemus long before he meets Nausicaa.
The fabula, and each incident within it, has a primarily mimetic structure; it imitates the ordering of events in the life that nonfictional people live. The siuzhet, and each of its parts, has a manipulative or rhetorical structure, shaped to make the reader share and even participate in the action of the text. It may mimic the literary genres of nonfiction, as in a novel in letters, but the one-dimensionality of the text determines its central organization. In most novels and epics, most incidents exist in both the fabula and the siuzhet, but the fabula may occasionally contain unrecounted incidents that are arguably not a part of the siuzhet, while the siuzhet will almost always contain similes, digressions, and other elements whose incidents have nothing to do with the world in which the characters act and are acted upon. When Milton calls book 9 of Paradise Lost “not less but more heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles on his foe pursu’d / Thrice fugitive about Troy Wall” (9.14–16), the flight of Hector plays no part in the lives of Adam or Lucifer, and thus is not a part of the fabula, but it briefly interrupts the account of those lives in the siuzhet. Tomashevsky distinguishes between works of literature where the fabula is central and those where the siuzhet matters far more, but in practice much of the literariness of virtually any substantial work of literature comes from the interplay between the two. Dramatic irony, for example, occurs when the siuzhet outpaces the fabula and characters living within the fabula act in ignorance of some fact in their world that the audience already knows. In the classical detective story, on the other hand, the fabula outpaces the siuzhet and leaves the reader in ignorance of who done it, which at least one of the characters knows full well. Such matters will enter my later discussion of King Lear and of the detective story known as Crime and Punishment.
This distinction between fabula and siuzhet has been a standard part of the critical vocabulary for the better part of a century, most often as an interesting peripheral concern. For this book, it leads to the most useful ways of understanding large works of literature.