Plots

ROBIN FEUER MILLER

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

—James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

A legendary scholar and teacher, both in Columbia University’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and in its trademark Core Curriculum, Robert L. Belknap (1929–2014) also served as acting dean of Columbia College, director of the Harriman (then Russian) Institute, and director of the University Seminars. His written work ranges from intensely focused books and essays on single works by single authors to a treatise, Tradition and Innovation: General Education and the Reintegration of the University, coauthored with Richard Kuhns, which embraced in the broadest terms the institution and goals of the university and of education. In the last decades of his life, Belknap was at work on his magnum opus—his book on plot. Having heard his lectures on various aspects of his work, I, like many others, began to imagine a voluminous tome in the making, almost a textbook or an encyclopedia of plots—a work unlike Belknap’s other idiosyncratic, creative, and forcefully argued writings, more oriented toward collecting and synthesizing past theories and knowledge.

Collect and synthesize the volume certainly does, but like Aristotle’s Poetics, this book is short, fiercely and economically argued, and, above all, persuasive, punctuated with the kinds of “aha” moments that Belknap had described in other contexts. He even presents his reader with a kind of meta “aha” moment when he defines two kinds of recognition that readers may experience: “If the audience knows what one or more characters do not, the audience experiences the powerful effect of dramatic irony. If the audience does not know, it experiences its own ‘aha,’ rather than a vicarious one” (56). In Plots, he has brought his focus to bear not only on particular works, but also on the broad question of plot—plot as it plays out in monumental, profoundly complex works. Always intrigued by theory, diagram, design, and structure, Belknap was also a critic of these enterprises when they failed to elucidate, became artificial, or simply functioned as ends in and of themselves. He always retained his capacity to see and to acknowledge if the emperor was wearing no clothes. How typical of Belknap to produce a magnum opus that is particular, profound, original, and short.

Beach-walkers who collect shards of beautifully polished sea-glass, molded and smoothed by sea and sand, its transparency rendered into translucence, find it increasingly difficult to come upon such treasures, probably because plastic bottles now substitute for glass and float on the sea in indestructible hordes or wash up onto the sand as non-degradable trash. Plots is a rare sea-glass, emerging from the ocean ready to be picked up by any walker who likes to traverse that boundary between sea and land, between the ocean of literature and experience and the drier sands of discourse about them. The sea-glass is a result of them both.

Belknap’s Plots is both pragmatic and philosophical. It abounds with trenchant definitions and bold epigrams while probing and appreciating paradox and mystery. Belknap asks the kind of questions most of us avoid because they are simultaneously too difficult and too basic to answer: What is an incident? Can an incident be as large as a whole novel or as small as three sentences? What is a summary? Are plots fractal? Most tautly argued literary theories find short or minor works to serve as elucidating examples. Belknap cheerfully tackles King Lear and Crime and Punishment to test his propositions.

Plots is as pithy as its title. In it, Belknap distills a lifetime of abundant reading and creative thinking about what plots are and how they work. Consider whether the following three paragraphs are a summary of Belknap’s book or a map of what is to come:

Literary plots deserve still more study. Plots arrange literary experience. Plot summaries need more serious study. The fabula arranges the events in the world the characters inhabit; the siuzhet arranges events in the world the reader encounters in the text. Authors can relate one incident to another only chronologically, spatially, causally, associatively, or narratively. Plots are fractal, formed from incidents that are formed from small, similarly shaped incidents. The best authorities consider plots and incidents to be tripartite, with a situation, a need, and an action. But siuzhets and the incidents that form them have two parts: an expectation and its fulfillment or frustration.

The plot of King Lear operates purposefully but also reflects the creative process. For integrity of impact, stages, actors, and the audience need a unity of action. Shakespeare replaced the Greek unity of action with a new thematic unity based on parallelism. Shakespeare uses conflict, the righting of wrongs, the healing of an inruption or disruption, and other standard plotting devices, but his recognition scenes move us most. Shakespeare prepares for his recognition scenes with elaborate lies. In King Lear, Shakespeare used elaborated lies to psychologize the Gloucester subplot. Tolstoy and Tate preferred the comforting plots of Lear’s sources to Shakespeare’s, but Shakespeare had considered that variant and rejected it.

The plot of Crime and Punishment draws rhetorical and moral power from the nature of novel plots and from the European and Russian tradition Dostoevsky inherited and developed. European novelists elaborated or assembled incidents into plots long before critics recognized the sophistication of the new genre in plotting such subgenres as the letter novel and the detective novel. Dostoevsky shaped and was shaped by the Russian version of the nineteenth-century novel. In reinventing the psychological plot, Dostoevsky challenged the current literary leaders. The siuzhet of part 1 of Crime and Punishment programs the reader to read the rest and to participate actively in a vicious murder. The one-sidedness of desire and violence in Crime and Punishment is more peculiar to Dostoevsky’s plotting than Dostoevshchina. Critics often attack Crime and Punishment for a rhetoric that exploits causality in ways they misunderstand. The epilogue of Crime and Punishment crystallizes its ideological plot. The plots of novels teach novelistic, not poetic, justice.

Belknap would sometimes paraphrase, in all seriousness, Samuel Johnson’s irreverent witticism about an unread book: “I’ve not read it, sir, but I have held it in my hand.” Belknap agreed with Johnson that holding a book in one’s hand is in fact a significant prelude to actually reading it. Readers who have already held Plots in their hands, perhaps admiring its neat, handy, and compact size, may have also glanced at its table of contents and noticed its eighteenth-century-like chapter headings. They will recognize the three paragraphs above as those titles converted into narrative.

When rendered as a set of paragraphs rather than chapter headings, these sentences become a summary of Belknap’s overall argument rather than the mapping of chapters for a reader moving through the text in time. They are also, Luther-style, the propositions that Belknap nails to the critical wall, propositions simply and boldly stated at the outset, defended with seriousness, logic, and learned irreverence in each of the chapters. Any one of these sentences or headings could serve as the operating thesis for a much longer study; yet Belknap achieves, even with his self-imposed constraint of brevity, a completeness for each argument. Are we willing to accept that plots are fractal? Have we ever thought that the incidents forming the siuzhet of a narrative might have only two parts, instead of the customary three? Do lies really fuel the plots of so many of William Shakespeare’s tragedies? Are desire and violence truly one-sided in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels and more essential than suffering for his plots? What is novelistic justice as compared to poetic justice? How can such a small book formulate and pose so many questions, let alone dare attempt to demonstrate solutions to them?

Belknap does not shy away from unfashionable words like “great” or “monumental.” Neither will I. (By reveling in such words and using them appropriately, he reminds readers of their value, of their moral and aesthetic weight.) Belknap was one of the finest and most original writers on Dostoevsky in the twentieth century. Bucking the trend of lengthy books about lengthy novels, his two books on The Brothers Karamazov, both small and concise like this one, remain essential reading for inquisitive readers of that great Russian author. For generations of Karamazov readers, Belknap has somehow merged with the novel, becoming a shadowy but intermittently observable figure, almost like the eponymous Kugelmass in Woody Allen’s early story, “The Kugelmass Episode,” whom readers discover lurking in Madame Bovary. Many of Belknap’s students and readers find him lurking in the corners of Dostoevsky’s works, shaping our reading.

Belknap’s distinctive style reflects his intellect; his predilection for reducing complex incidents to their elemental units not to simplify so much as to expose their intricacy; and his talent for marshaling evidence from numerous sources, high and low, in his task of persuasion. He also casually uses words that send readers to the dictionary and reward us for the effort—for example, “inruption” (already cited in the table of contents of this book), “achrony,” or “proairetic,” all useful words that make one wonder at the rarity of their general usage. Likewise, among the many other works of fiction, drama, philosophy, history, and criticism to which he will allude lightly but meaningfully are some about which the reader may well have been completely ignorant. Take, for example, his passing allusion to Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines: A Series of Fifteen Tales: although cited in the context of a discussion about motivation in Shakespeare, it may inspire the reader to think in different ways about Dostoevsky’s heroines as well. For example, what did little Dunya and Raskolnikov fight about as children? How did little Sonya react when her mother died? “In fiction,” Belknap tells us, “an unknown or assertedly nonexistent cause is not just unknown but simply not there” (100). Though we may choose to ponder such hypothetical questions, we cannot answer them. They are simply outside the causal system of the work at hand. Earlier, Belknap had argued that “fiction obviates much of the philosophical debate about causation” (22). In a novel or play, on the contrary, causation is “by fiat” (24).

Among those readers who are also teachers of literature, how many of you, like me, hasten in your introductory lectures to get definitions and discussions of plot out of the way at the outset so as to focus on more interesting and seemingly complex questions about such matters as character, motivation, space, narration, discourse, metaphor, and detail? Perhaps you teach your students about the differences between the fabula and the siuzhet, making passing reference to the Russian formalists or to René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature. Your students may memorize the definitions of these two moderately useful terms and quickly come to substitute in their minds the narration for the siuzhet, or some similar formulation. Then it is on to other matters. The notion of fabula gets even shorter shrift. As merely the incidents or events of the story in the chronological order in which they actually occur, the fabula may seem to operate as a simple background that allows the author to create the intricate narrative fabric of what is generally assumed to be the far more interesting siuzhet.