Within the fabula or the siuzhet, two incidents can be related in very few ways. One can occur before or after another, near or far from it, because of it, resemble it, or be narrated within it. In the fabula these relationships differ from those in the siuzhet. Let us start by looking at time in the siuzhet.
Chronologically, incidents in the siuzhet can come before or after other incidents, in the text and in the reader’s or audience’s experience of the text. An incident in the siuzhet may also interrupt another incident that therefore brackets it. These are the only chronological relationships possible in the siuzhet, though sometimes, as in The Arabian Nights or Tristram Shandy, interruptions can effloresce magnificently. In general, all these chronological relationships exploit the fact that the siuzhet, like time itself, is one-dimensional. Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoön calls attention to many of the implications of this fact. Novels with pages that can be shuffled may confuse the issue slightly, as was intended. Scholars in Mikhail Bakhtin’s tradition link time and space into a multidimensional chronotope that I have subdivided for expository clarity and will explore further.
In the fabula, the Before–After relationship is more complicated. Its zero degree, simultaneity, can be as important as the absence of an ending on a word in an inflected language. In the world the characters inhabit, incidents may occur simultaneously as well as happen before or after other incidents, or bracket or interrupt them. In practice, this possibility constitutes a key difference between the fabula and the siuzhet. In addition, within the fabula the Before–After system may even be eliminated entirely. A catalogue of incidents, or a bill of particulars, may involve incidents in the lives of the characters which exist in no particular chronology. If fiction were history, one could argue that the timing had simply been lost, but in a literary fabula, pure achrony is possible in a list of incidents whereas, except in the shuffled novel, incidents in the siuzhet always come before or after one another.
Spatially, in the siuzhet the world can occasionally be two- or three-dimensional, especially in drama, where incidents can occur at different places on the stage; or in a Sergei Eisenstein film, where each frame aspires to two-dimensional design; or in Kabuki theater, where each moment tries to relate the interacting characters, props, and scenery into a visual tableau, as early ballet did in the West. In calligraphy and in certain printed Baroque poetry, the incidents presented on a page can also assume a visual relationship, but the normal shape of the siuzhet in verbal texts is one-dimensional, beautifully adapted to the shape of time but not of space, which causes problems in the way the siuzhet presents the fabula.
Spatial relationships between incidents occasionally play a crucial part in the fabula. When they do, the relationship will often be associative as well. Asians sometimes talk about six directions: North–South, East–West, and Up–Down. In the Western tradition, we tend to pair these directions and talk about three dimensions, but Down–Up would doubtless be the briefest summary of the Divine Comedy, and the key relationships between Dante’s incidents tend to be spatial along this axis, much as Southness is central to the spatial organization of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The television series Upstairs-Downstairs, on the other hand, uses the directional signs more for association with social class than as directions, much as Southness is used in many American Civil War stories to denote a culture as well as a spatial quality. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, it has been observed that incidents are related by insideness, with its connotation of coziness, and outsideness, with its connotation of adventure in the fearsome London jungle. Incidents may be linked or separated by the way they are located, affecting the causal system, as in Evgeny Shvarts’s play The Treasure, where characters talk across a gulf that can be crossed only by making a four-day detour. Such a location permits verbal causation but excludes physical causation. In a Buster Keaton movie, characters can hunt each other on a ship for minutes on end, each always on the opposite side or on the wrong deck for finding the other.
In the siuzhet, we have seen that the chronological system usually cannot be distinguished from the spatial, which normally has to be reduced to a single dimension. In the fabula, Bakhtinians think of the two systems as a single chronotope, much as how in their equations physicists think of time as a fourth dimension. In the fabula of some science fiction and fantasy writing, such as Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno or his Alice books, independent or interacting time-space systems may coexist. Alice does not meet the White Knight before or after the events in her real world, but in a separate looking-glass time system, and the rabbit hole leaves her not under land but in wonderland. One time-space system is enough for most books, however. When Lessing, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and many others discuss the problem of representing this multidimensional world in the one-dimensional world of a literary text, they find it as basic in literature as the problem in the visual arts previously mentioned: abstracting a three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional surface through the various systems of perspective, or representing motion in rock or bronze.
Bakhtin’s studies of the history of the chronotope shape part of my discussion of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novelistic plotting. Here, it is sufficient to indicate that the chronological and spacial relationships pit the fabula against the siuzhet, because the fabula, which is multidimensional in space and time, is accessible only through the basically one-dimensional siuzhet. The simplest way to shift simultaneity to the chronological system of the siuzhet is to say, “Meanwhile, back at the ranch,” and carry the reader sequentially through a spatial shift. Authors have a rich body of techniques for solving this Laocoön problem, but over the centuries it has become not so much a problem as a great resource for producing literary effects. Much of the artistry critics have studied for millennia rests on the exploitation of the difference between time and space in the fabula and time and space in the siuzhet. Homer was praised in classical times for beginning in medias res, telling the middle of the fabula at the beginning of the siuzhet. This body of techniques includes the whole world of interruption, delaying mechanisms, suspense, foreshadowing, sideshadowing (to use Gary Saul Morson’s term), and curiosité, that cousin of suspense which puzzles readers as to what is going on at the present moment rather than what will happen next, which is the domain of suspense. These mechanisms take different forms at different periods and in different genres, and will enter this study in various restricted contexts.
The cause/effect relationship is central for the fabula and is sometimes, but not always, important for the siuzhet, where it takes the form described by Viktor Shklovsky and the other Formalists as the motivirovka. The motivirovka must not be confused with the characters’ motivations for action in the fabula. The best translation of motivirovka may be “rationale.” The rationale justifies the existence of a text or some part of it: a manuscript found in a bottle or a story told for a particular purpose. The play within a play in The Taming of the Shrew takes its rationale from the introductory play, which many modern productions omit entirely. In a skaz, a story with a socially defined narrator, the rationale for the story may be an incident, like the shipboard meeting between the framing narrator and the horsebreaker in Nikolai Leskov’s Enchanted Wanderer; or it may be an implied situation, as in a Damon Runyon story presented in the language of a Broadway tout with no framing introduction. When one incident becomes the rationale for another, as when Scheherazade’s encounter with the Caliph explains the existence of her stories, the reader experiences in the siuzhet the equivalent of causal linkage between two incidents in the fabula. But very often in the siuzhet, cause and effect play a minor role.
Even in the fabula, where cause and effect are central, incidents are occasionally unrelated causally: “And then another adventure befell me”; “By a strange coincidence,” and so on. Fiction obviates much of the philosophical debate about causation. David Hume may argue that we deduce causal relationships from consistent sequences of events, but while narrators in a novel or a play may rely on such deductions—“I threw the hammer at him and he died”—they also have the power to declare events causally related or unrelated, sometimes in ways designed to puzzle the reader. Such perverse or unexplained causation by pure fiat plays a large part in the mystery of certain lyrics, such as John Webster’s:
Call for the robin redbreast and the wren,
Since o’er the shady groves they hover
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
(The White Devil, 5.4.96–99)
Or John Keats’s:
And that is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
(“La Belle Dame Sans Merci”)
In these passages the causal words—“since,” “why,” and “though”—set off rationalizing reverberations in the reader’s mind that open up worlds of enchantment and alternative reality. Such cases of expressed causality with restricted justification are as rare as their opposite, suppressed or distorted causation, as in the case of the character in the first scene of Nikolai Gogol’s Inspector General, who claims that his colleague has smelled of alcohol ever since his mother dropped him as a baby, denying the causal tie with the man’s current lifestyle that the audience is expected to realize. Such causation or non-causation by pure fiat at first leads us out of the world of everyday life, but then, since there is no such thing as a pure literary experience unmediated by the rest of our experience, literary or other, our rationalizing instincts collide with our literary experience. The knowledge of genre, of literary allusion, of social background, of our own psychology all shape our responses to a work of literature, but the most basic plot relationships interact with some of the most basic patterns of our mind. When the interaction is dissonant, our reactions are the standard regressions to childhood, a giggle, or that creepy feeling that is also produced by the uncanny. Most commonly, however, causation by fiat works in parallel with causation perceived by the reader. In etiological tales, like many of those we know from Rudyard Kipling or Claude Lévi-Strauss, an incident may cause not an incident but a situation we already accept, such as an existing anatomical peculiarity or culinary custom. In other words, the integrity of the work comes in part from the fact that the causes the narrator cites make sense of some aspect of the reader’s extra-literary experience.
Most of the time, the cause and effect system in the fabula works in close parallel with the chronological system, but one whole area of causality can be relatively independent of the Before–After relationship. Psychological causation, which we call “motivation,” may look to the future as easily as to the past. When a subsequent incident motivates a prior one, we call it the prior incident’s “goal.” When a prior incident motivates a subsequent one, we call the subsequent one a “response.” Motivation constitutes the most intricate and subtle part of the causal way of relating one event to another. When I turn to the theory of drama, we will encounter Aristotle’s view that every event in a drama has to be causally related to every other, and when I turn to the theory of the novel, we will encounter E. M. Forster’s sense that the causal system powers the plot.
Incidents can be embedded in other incidents in dramatic, lyrical, and other genres, as well as in genres that we consider primarily narrative, like epics and novels. The rationale or motivirovka for an incident is often provided by embedding it in another incident. When Othello talked of
the most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field;
Of hairbreadth scapes i’ th’ imminent deadly breach;
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence
And portance in my travel’s history…
(Othello, 1.3.135–40)
Desdemona loved him for the dangers he had narrated, and he loved her that she did pity them. Here, in the siuzhet, Othello’s questioners provide the motivirovka for the presence of these adventures in the play, while in the fabula, the narration of these adventures provides the motivation for Desdemona’s love. In this way, the causal system of the siuzhet works closely with the system of embedded materials in the fabula and the siuzhet.
When characters recount their own actions or those of others, the act of narrating stands between the audience and the narrated action. The anonymous narrator of many novels is just as much a created character as the prologue or any character in a drama, and characters in many literary genres tell stories of one sort or another. Embedding can establish a narrative hierarchy among incidents. A character in one incident narrates an incident in which a character narrates a third incident. In The Arabian Nights, such subordination can go down to the fifth level, interworking with the other kinds of relationships. By merely existing at the narrated level, each story prolongs Scheherazade’s life at the narrating level, but often stories are introduced because they are similar to something that has happened at a higher narrative level or because they caused it, and sometimes they happen before, after, or during incidents at other levels, or in the same place.
This use of embedded incidents lies near the artistic center of The Arabian Nights—and that is rare in literature—but The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and a host of other works illustrate the importance of this kind of relationship in the evolution of the novel, a matter I will discuss when I try to locate the plot of Crime and Punishment in the history of novelistic plots. For now, it will suffice to repeat that incidents related by being embedded complicate the relation between the fabula and the siuzhet. Othello does not woo Desdemona on stage; his wooing enters the fabula of the play through two conflicting accounts whose interaction influences the Venetian duke in the causal system of the play. Through this narration, his narrated adventures also become part of the fabula and their narration causes Desdemona to react to them. One character’s fabula can be another’s siuzhet when incidents are embedded in narrated incidents.
In both the fabula and the siuzhet, incidents can also be related associatively. Such relationships can take many forms, sometimes by the fiat of a narrator or a character and sometimes through the reader’s direct apprehension. An incident may be identical to another, or similar, or (in theory, at least) bear no resemblance. Both identical and totally unrelated incidents are rare. Two incidents with zero points in common would probably be impossible in history or in the science of pattern recognition, but fiction permits the pure case by fiat, where a reliable narrator says that two incidents have no resemblance at all, although I cannot think of an example. At the other end of the spectrum, exact repetitions can occur on any scale. The most perfect example of large-scale repetition occurs not in fiction but in fictional fiction: Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote surpasses the French Don Quixote and other imitations by being closer to Cervantes’s, in fact by being identical with it. Even such repetition cannot fully duplicate the original, as Jorge Luis Borges’s narrator points out in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” because the existence of Cervantes’s text makes this new one different.
On a smaller scale, similarity can be regarded as the repetition of certain elements in a whole. Repeated passages can serve many purposes. In epic, when the whole Achaean expedition is in danger, Agamemnon’s offer to reward Achilles’s service is elaborated twice in virtually the same words. But even though the identity of the repeated passage is changed somewhat by the existence of the first passage, the length of the repetition has attracted considerable critical attention. In lyric, however, repetitions of a refrain or a line commonly occupy a larger percentage of the total poem, growing in meaning as the context changes, as in Thomas Nashe’s refrain which, as the next chapters will show, is in itself a fabular incident: “I am sick, I must die. Lord have mercy on us.” On a scale smaller than a single line, repetitions tend to fall under the Aristotelian heading of diction, including many of the standard rhetorical devices: anaphora; the whole world of versification, with the repetition of consonantal sounds in alliterative poetry, of vowel sounds in assonant poetry, of both in rhymed poetry, of quantitative patterns in Roman poetry, of pitch patterns in Greek poetry, of loudness patterns in English poetry; and in general, as Roman Jakobson points out, the manipulation of whatever feature carries the most phonemic meaning in a given language—an observation that helps explain why English experiments in quantitative poetry or Russian experiments in syllabic poetry never established vigorous movements. In his “Grammatical Parallelism and its Russian Facet,” Jakobson quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins when he observes: “The artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say of all artifice, reduces itself to the principle of parallelism. The structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism, ranging from the technical so-called parallelism of Hebrew poetry and the antiphons of Church music to the intricacy of Greek or Italian or English verse” (399).
In the world of prose plots, parallelism plays almost as important a role as Hopkins gives it in the world of diction, but in most cases the parallel takes a form more like rhyme or metaphor than perfect repetition. That is, some elements of an incident recur and some are changed. Whole genres of literature center on such partial parallelism, and at the smallest level, most literature contains metaphors that sometimes compare things but often compare actions, a corner of plot studies that Christine Brooke-Rose has amply explored.
At the grandest level, the three- and fourfold allegorical systems of late classical, medieval, and more recent literature, or typological readings of the Bible, are based on such parallels. Allegorical plays and novels do exist, but the traditions that are central in this book use less elaborated parallels. A traditional allegory is a mapping of one plot onto another, with each element in one corresponding to an element in the other and each relationship among elements in one corresponding to a relationship among elements in the other. To achieve such correspondences, the author of one plot must be attuned to the author of the other, who in most cases is assumed to be God. The possibility of fourfold allegory implies that we are living in an orderly universe, where history has the same relationships among its parts as a human being’s salvation has, or the entire creation and salvation of the universe has, or a text written by an inspired author has, because the Creator has left his signature on every element in His creation. Plato claims that justice in a republic was the same virtue as justice in a human being, and that the parts of a human soul match those in a state and stand in the same just or unjust relationships to one another. A monomaniac runs his life as a tyrannical state runs itself.
When critics impose allegory upon works of literature not written with allegory in mind, the results can sometimes be ingenious, sometimes noble, sometimes laughable, and sometimes sick. Allegorization can also save a precious text. The Song of Solomon was too sensuous for certain ascetics in the Christian church, but survived in the canon as an allegory of the relationship between the Church and God. But King Lear and Crime and Punishment have not responded well to allegorical treatment. Elizabethan drama and nineteenth-century novels use parallelism instead of allegory to lead their audience to generalize thematically.
Pattern-recognition theorists often claim that everything resembles everything else. Computers in the post office that read addresses must be programmed to know which squiggles matter and which do not. Large works of literature do just that to readers. They have the time to train us to feel and sometimes see the points of similarity and contrast that matter, whether we are dealing with the two plots of King Lear and other Shakespearean plays or with what Jan Meijer called “situation rhyme” in Dostoevsky’s novels. But these are discussions for the chapters of practical criticism that will come after these theoretical chapters.