After many pages discussing what plots are, how they work, and what they can accomplish, it is time to address a final question, what plots mean, and the attendant hermeneutic question, how that meaning is knowable. For Plato, as we have mentioned, meaning often took the allegorical form we have described when we talked about parallelism. When he depicts the way a tyrant runs a Greek polity, he is also showing how a monomaniac runs his life, and he believes that the events in the state would unfold in a way that would unveil the more obscure events in the psyche. Plato apparently never saw any need to explain such correspondences.
For Plato, these correspondences may have emerged automatically from the sense that all examples of anything partook of an unchanging reality, or that the names of things arose from their identities. Others have found meaning in the overall feeling that a work of literature gives them, which turns the meaning of a text into a part of the autobiography of the reader. Positivists in the last century tried to prove that an author meant a given thing by quoting a character who had said it. Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony drove out that approach by locating meaning in the interaction of the statements and the actions of the various characters, which again reduced the possibility of verifiability. In the 1970s, the New Nihilism aspired to deny the existence of any detectable meaning in a text, locating it in the views of a critic, or sometimes of a community of critics, and sometimes denying that there was any meaning to detect at all. This was almost a return to the early nineteenth-century commonplace that meaning was not even a desideratum: a poem should not mean but be. I should like to suggest that a plot can offer insight into the meaning of a text, and sometimes produce rather surprising insights.
Let me begin by making fun of the commonest way of finding meaning in a literary plot and then giving an example of a more serious argument. According to many of the most fashionable critics, plots can reveal the ideological position of the author in a very simple way. A review of the 1997 movie Titanic offers a good example:
DeMille and his modern-day counterpart, James Cameron, portray working people as salt-of-the-earth types who frequently best their so-called “betters.” This is evident in Titanic, where scenes show the working-class artist Jack Dawson triumphing over wealthy Cal Hockley in dinner conversation and in winning Rose DeWitt Bukater’s love.
Yet, beneath the liberal veneer of Titanic and cross-class fantasies of the 1920s are highly conservative attitudes toward class relations. Mr. Cameron concedes a sense of moral superiority to his blue-collar protagonists—but in the end it is the rich who triumph, while the poor return to their “proper” place. Unfortunately, in Titanic, that place is at the bottom of the sea: Most of the working-class passengers perish while the rich survive. What sort of triumph is that?
There is a fatalism at work in Titanic that suggests this is the way it was and always will be; there is nothing anyone can do to remedy the situation in which the so-called inferior class constantly is oppressed by the superior class. It is this sense of class despair and defeat that makes Titanic politically conservative.
Could Titanic have been any different? Sure. If working-class people are the betters in the film, then let the rich die and the poor survive.
(Ross, “Get Me Rewrite”)
Here, the critic has learned the author’s view of the class struggle from the outcome of the movie. He need not worry about the argument that in this particular shipwreck the rich did indeed fared better in survival than the poor because the producer of the film could have selected a different shipwreck to dramatize, one in which the rich were duly exterminated. In educational administration and grant-giving, outcomes are in, and the availability of measurable results often determines policy. In literature, the ending offers a great incentive to a critic. By relying on the ending of a text to learn an author’s ideology, a critic can save him or herself the trouble of reading the rest of the text.
It is easy to mock a critic floundering for something serious to say about a less than serious film, but first-rate literary minds sometimes use the same method of discovering an author’s meaning. Anna Akhmatova attacked Tolstoy for degrading Anna Karenina after she leaves Karenin, because “Tolstoy wished to show that a woman who has abandoned her lawful husband inescapably becomes a prostitute” (Berlin, 195–96). Tolstoy himself reacted favorably to a similar comment by a critic in the 1880s. M. S. Gromeka had called Anna Karenina a passionate woman living for love alone and for it sacrificing family, social position, and finally, life itself. He had claimed that Tolstoy had shown us that in this area (family life), there is no untrammeled freedom; there are laws, and it depends upon an individual’s will to follow them and be happy or to break them and be unhappy. Tolstoy praised Gromeka for detecting in a relatively early work the moral positions that Tolstoy propounded in his later writings.
One of these critics attacks Tolstoy and the other praises him, but they agree that his treatment of Anna Karenina’s decline and death expresses his view of her deserts. Tolstoy seems to agree with this view in the 1880s, but by then his positions had crystallized in a somewhat different form. In any case, the debate over Anna’s behavior seems to inspire real doubts about Tolstoy’s skill as a rhetorician. He stated later that an author should infect his readers with the highest moral and religious ideas of his time, and yet good readers cannot agree on Anna’s moral status. Gina Kovarsky has offered the best defense of the novel’s rhetoric. She argues that there are two kinds of professors: the magisterial one who stands before an audience and propounds the truth, and the dialogic one who sits with the students and stimulates their participation in the exploration of a problem. Usually, Tolstoy was the first kind of professor. We know where he stands. He began Anna Karenina with a clear moral position. But as he wrote it, the plot he created led him for a moment into the other style, and he wrote a novel that started a debate that has been educating us for a century and a half.
Though endings do not offer easy moral teachings, the central question here is whether or in what cases we can use the ending of a work of literature to learn the meaning of the work. This approach to the analysis of texts relies on the assumption that the text has a happy ending. Many texts do. In fairy tales, for example, the Ogre tends to come to a bad end, and the nice Hero tends to live happily ever after. Bruno Bettelheim made such endings a part of his definition of a fairy tale and simply excluded unconforming examples from the genre.
The ending…in myths is nearly always tragic, while always happy in fairy tales. For this reason, some of the best-known stories found in collections of fairy tales don’t really belong in this category. For example, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” and “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” are beautiful but extremely sad; they do not convey the feeling of consolation characteristic of fairy tales at the end. Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” on the other hand, comes quite close to being a true fairy tale.
(The Uses of Enchantment, 37)
Bettelheim’s reasoning is not really circular here. He is not describing an existing canon but defining a new one, and the chief threat to his argument comes not from theory but from literary history. Robert Darnton has studied some of these same fairy tales in their eighteenth-century variants, which are often closer to the stories peasants told around the fire than those that Grimm and Andersen collected and presented in nineteenth-century style. Darnton found that endings often are not happy in the earliest versions of the tales he studied. Lévi-Strauss, of course, has denied the true priority of the earliest available version of folk material, asserting that every version adapts the matter of a tale to the social and literary milieu of which it is a part, so that the early version may tell us something about the society, but is just one more version of the tale. Bettelheim’s theory gains plausibility if a literary genre is treated as a collection of expectations on the part of the readership. I read many fairy stories to my children when they were small, and once came upon one by Madame d’Aulnoy that ended as follows:
“Cruel Princess!” said the King, “would you make my life horrible to me by marrying another before my eyes?”
“Not so,” replied the Yellow Dwarf; “You are a rival of whom I am too much afraid: you shall not see our marriage.” So saying, in spite of Bellissima’s tears and cries, he stabbed the King to the heart with the diamond sword.
The poor Princess, seeing her lover lying dead at her feet, could no longer live without him; she sank down by him and died of a broken heart.
So ended these unfortunate lovers, whom not even the Mermaid could help, because all the magic power had been lost with the diamond sword.
As to the wicked Dwarf, he preferred to see the Princess dead rather than married to the King.
(The Yellow Dwarf)
My daughters screamed loudly at this outcome, not concerned for the prince (who was a dull stick), nor for the princess (who was a prune), but rather for the genre, the fairy tale as Bettleheim had described it, which demanded poetic justice. They could not have said so, but their literary expectations had been affronted, and Bettelheim was right. This is a genre that small Americans can recognize and respond to, and an important element in its identity is its happy ending. Without this sense on a child’s part, there would be no market for the recent children’s book about the three little wolves and the big bad pig.
Given that happy endings belong to the collection of stories Bettelheim calls fairy tales, the question remains whether it is proper to assume that Anna Karenina has an ending that its author considered happy. For certain genres, such an assumption is justified. In the United States, when talking movies seemed to be as much a threat to public morals as the Internet seems to be today, the film industry tried to set up its own censorship to preempt government intervention. On December 20, 1938, the Hays Office promulgated its “Special Regulations on Crime in Motion Pictures.” Certain matters were excluded altogether: “There must be no scenes, at any time, showing law-enforcing officers dying at the hands of criminals. This includes private detectives and guards for banks, motor trucks, etc” (MPAA, in Doherty, 356) Other matters were tightly circumscribed: “With special reference to the crime of kidnapping—or illegal abduction—such stories are acceptable under the code only when the kidnapping or abduction is (a) not the main theme of the story; (b) the person kidnapped is not a child; (c) there are no details of the crime of kidnapping; (d) no profit accrues to the abductors or kidnappers; and (e) where the kidnappers are punished. These last two elements relate to the question of outcomes, which are an important part of many of these regulations: ‘no picture shall be…approved if based upon the life of…a notorious criminal unless the character in the film be punished for crimes shown in the film as committed by him.’”
The reasoning behind such rules can take two forms: Plato had argued that simply seeing a lack of virtue would lead many of us to imitate it; others argue that if crime pays, criminal behavior will become rational. Plato’s fear of direct imitation can be justified regardless of punishment. The second of these arguments, however, underlies those Hays Code regulations that relate to retribution and other outcomes. In a movie subject to these rules, it would seem appropriate to explore an author’s values by examining which characters get punished. But interpretations of punishment and punishable behavior vary. Preston Sturges’s Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) presented a problem. A character in the movie behaves in a manner that in those times could be called sexually promiscuous, and the Hays Office objected not to her behavior but to the fact that it went unpunished. Sturges replied, in essence, “Not punished? I gave her septuplets!” When literary conduct is constricted by censorship, whether by a government, by commercial considerations, or by political or religious pressure groups, endings, like beginnings, often tend toward the obfuscatory. But when the author plays honestly (or spinelessly) by the rules, it seems fair to expect the ending to reveal the meaning of the work.
In Stalin’s time, Socialist Realism included an obligation for “optimism,” which normally included a happy ending, although there were a few debates, like the one about the drama Optimisticheskaia tragediia (The Optimistic Tragedy). In general, the tragic seems to conflict with the idea of a happy ending. Granted, Aristotle felt that the most successful tragic heroes had a tragic flaw that was in some sense connected with their destruction, but his reasoning is only partly connected with the idea that the flaw itself makes the hero deserve destruction. Aristotle did feel that the destruction of a completely good character would be repugnant to Greek audiences, but this position is very different from the belief that a tragic hero deserves what happens to him. The flaw serves another purpose. Suppose I am walking along the street and a brick falls on my head, killing me. That would be unfortunate for me, but it would not be tragic. To suffer a tragic fate, I would have to be aware of it, struggle against it, and in some sense participate in it. A tragic flaw enables a hero to play a part in his destruction, and without that participation the hero’s destruction is not complete. For Aristotle, a thoroughly villainous person’s fall from good fortune into misfortune can contain moral satisfaction, but not pity or terror, as the former is for a person undeserving of his misfortune and the latter for a person like ourselves (Poetics, 53a3). Aristotle has nothing against moral satisfaction—in fact, he asserts its importance for society in his Ethics—but he considers it unrelated to the function of tragedy, which is to produce terror and pity. Fairy tales of the kind Bettelheim describes may be valuable instruments for acculturating the very young to a cruel and confusing world, but they are bad training for reading Sophocles. Oedipus, Ajax, Philoctetes, and the others are great men, and they suffer greatly, but not because they deserve it. Sophocles constructs an ineluctable set of causes, psychological, human, and supernatural, which we sometimes call fate.
The most convincing proof that the moral satisfaction that comes from poetic justice is at most incidental to tragedy is the pair of endings for Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. In one, the villainous Odysseus triumphs, and Agamemnon takes his nobly obedient daughter from a wedding to the greatest of his warriors and sacrifices her to the otherwise merciless Artemis. In the other version, Iphigenia, like Isaac, is rescued by the divinity, who substitutes an animal. Scholars differ on whether Euripides wrote both versions, but there is no question that both are ancient, which is to say that both satisfied the expectations that ancient audiences held for tragedy. Euripides made Iphigenia undeserving of her fate, but he was working in a genre that permitted but did not demand happy endings.
For novels, the situation is curiously comparable. Critics have attacked Flaubert for killing Emma Bovary at the end of his novel, and called him a prude for punishing her self-delusion and her sexual infidelity. Curiously, we tend not to blame him for rewarding the most thoroughly despicable character in the novel, Homais the apothecary, who receives the Legion of Honor for his attainments. One could perhaps argue that Homais is a comic figure, that poetic justice in comedy is often not for keeps, that there is an old comic tradition in which the villain and the hero end the play by going off to dinner together. But for novels, too, there is some hard evidence that moral satisfaction is simply not a part of the collection of expectations that constitute the genre. Dickens wrote two endings for Great Expectations. In one, Pip marries Estella and lives happily with her for a long time. In the other, he lives on in the lonely misery that many readers would say he deserves. Here, the morally satisfying ending collides with the one that gratifies our fondness for the character who has been the center of our attention for hundreds of pages. We readers do not want Pip to get what he deserves. In any case, Dickens proves that the novel does not join the ranks of genres where poetic justice of either kind is built into the genre.
The plots of all great novels and tragedies are about good and evil, but they rarely scold or threaten, and rarely lecture at us. They exercise our moral faculties by forcing us to make decisions and judgments and debate them with the characters and with our peers. The plot can, however, enable us to escape misreadings if it is used intelligently. When I discussed Dostoevshchina, I called attention to suffering as a key element. After all, how can one write about Dostoevsky, any more than about King Lear, without discussing suffering? Many critics have asserted that Dostoevsky depicted suffering because that was the way he got his kicks. In his 1882 book about Dostoevsky’s “cruel talent,” N. K. Mikhailovsky expressed this view: “Cruelty and torture always preoccupied Dostoevsky, and did so specifically from the aspect of their attractiveness, from the aspect of the sensual pleasure contained in torturing.” Maksim Gorky’s 1913 article on Karamazovism (O ‘Karamazovshchine) made it clear whose pleasure was involved: “Dostoevsky, himself a mighty torturer and a man with a sick conscience, loved to describe just this dark, depraved, antipathetic spirit.” The evidence for Dostoevsky’s sadism or masochism, however, can virtually always be traced to that insistency in his literary works and occasionally in his conversation which it is adduced to explain. Dostoevsky could be abusive and vicious when he lost his temper, but his documented behavior outside of his writing offers little support for the theory Mikhailovsky and so many others have proclaimed. A second, more prevalent theory claims that, quite apart from any sensations it aroused in him, Dostoevsky idealized suffering—sometimes as a way to Christian salvation, sometimes in order to justify a social system that produced so much suffering, and sometimes for both reasons. Our example of this theory may come from M. A. Antonovich’s article on Dostoevsky’s “mystico-ascetic novel,” The Brothers Karamazov, printed in 1881, the year of Dostoevsky’s death, a year before Mikhailovsky’s article.
The author so skillfully thought up all the circumstances of the murder that suspicion fell on Mitya, who was altogether innocent. Mitya was arrested and tried. Here emerged all his greatness of soul, all the profundity of his faith and devotion to providence. For the glory of God and for the redemption of his sins, he decided to suffer innocently…. Mitya’s decision to suffer innocently in order to be morally resurrected and by this suffering to redeem the suffering of others at first glance seems capricious, the whim of a sick fantasy, and no sort of general moral principle with any serious bases. But in fact, it turns out that this decision is a real moral principle and that it is seriously and passionately preached by such a profound moralist as the elder Zosima, in his teaching, composed, of course, by the author of the novel.
(“Mystiko-asketicheskiy roman”)
Antonovich’s article has reverberated through Dostoevsky criticism for generations, and I suspect that some of the articles by Russian priests praising Dostoevsky draw their understanding of his novels from Antonovich. He summarizes Mitya Karamazov’s position more or less correctly at that moment in the novel, but he ignores the fact that Zosima’s disciple, Alyosha, advises Mitya not to take on this suffering, and he represents Zosima’s attitude with a major distortion. All three of these critics use a critical technique that we have rejected in this book, the ascription to Dostoevsky of the views of his characters.
The plot of Crime and Punishment, like that of Poor Folk, however, offers a very different attitude toward suffering. Only a few Dostoevsky characters in these novels appear before and after they suffer. Some, like Razumikhin or Dunya, never suffer. He experiences the pain of cold and hunger, and she the indignity of engagement to Luzhin. But pain and indignity are different from suffering. Pain is the psychological expression of damage to the body, indignity is the same but directed against one’s status. Suffering is the psychological expression of damage to the psyche itself. Sonya suffers, but remains unchanged. We see her parents before and after their suffering. Before suffering, her stepmother was a silly provincial girl, most notable for having danced with a shawl before the governor and for marrying a military man for love. After suffering, she is a vicious hag who drags her husband about the room by his hair, beating his head against the floor; drives her stepchild to prostitution and her own children to beg on the streets; spends the tiny sum of money that comes her way on a horrible funeral banquet; and never abates in her ridiculously genteel social pretentions. Before suffering, her husband is an unimportant civil servant so decent that he marries her because he cannot bear to see her and her family starve when she is widowed. Her hectoring and his job loss drive him to drink, destitution, and a cycle of self-inflicted suffering that destroys the lives of those around him. In Poor Folk, Varvara risks her life and health caring for her dying parents and the student she adores. She struggles to buy him a gift he longs for, then lets his pathetic father get the credit for it. Then, as we have seen, she suffers in a way we never learn about. After that, she still is kind to the man she loves, but she is not about to starve with him, and she marries a man who had hurt her but can feed her.
The plots of these novels suggest that suffering reduces generosity and kindness and undermines the spiritual and moral worth of these otherwise ordinary people. The most nearly autobiographical of Dostoevsky’s major works, The House of the Dead, describes his sufferings in a Russian prison camp, but it begins with a rich account of how little penitence or moral improvement such suffering produced. Despite Antonovich’s account, and the word of many separate characters, most of Dostoevsky’s plots proclaim that suffering makes us worse people. One great exception to this rule stands out, as we have seen in Crime and Punishment. For murderers like Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, confession, punishment, and suffering can be the only way to salvation.
On issues like suffering, on which critics can have strong impressions, the plot can lead to challenging new readings, but only if we read the text not for poetic justice but for novelistic justice, which is so deeply embedded in the causal system that our childish desires, and those of the characters, cannot prevail against them. At this moment in the history of culture, the powers and the design of verbal plots need special attention, because movies, television, and computer games offer a new set of opportunities to make artistic plots as disruptive as political plots if audiences do not understand the mechanisms of their rhetoric. But that is the beginning of a new story, the story of the gradual transformation of our civilization, its rebirth, and its engagement with a new, hitherto quite unknown reality. This could constitute the plot of a new account—but our present account is completed.