Reading for the Plot

Reading for the Plot

PETER BROOKS

In this excerpt from chapter 1 of 'Reading for the Plot' ( 1984) Peter Brooks sets out to update and redefine the traditional concept of 'plot', fallen into disuse in the English-speaking world after the adverse criticism of such modernist critics as E. M. Forster. In line with French narratology, Brooks reiterates Aristotle's contention in the Poetics that plot, defined as 'the combination of the incidents, or things done in the story', is the most important element of narrative. He analyses various aspects of such concepts as the Russian formalist 'fabula' and 'siuzhet', Grard Genette's 'histoire' and 'discours' and Jonathan Culler's 'story' and 'discourse', concluding that a purely structuralist definition of plot would be restrictive and inadequate. In order to be explanatory, the analysis of plot -- understood as the organizing line of a narrative -- should be able to take account of intentionality. To this end, Brooks proposes a leap beyond formalism and specifically towards Freudian psychoanalysis, which is in line with much feminist criticism of the 1980s. In this connection it is interesting to point out the similarity between the title of chapter 2 of 'Reading for the Plot', 'Narrative Desire', and Teresa de Lauretis' 'Desire in Narrative', also published in 1984, which is reprinted as chapter 17 of this book. But whereas de Lauretis applies Freudian psychoanalysis to the desire of the woman spectator in film, Brooks's re-reading of Freud remains male-oriented. The main emphasis of his formulation lies in his conception of narrative as a psychological structuring device which governs both human behaviour and the definition of self.

I

'Reading for the plot,' we learned somewhere in the course of our

schooling, is a low form of activity. Modern criticism, especially in its Anglo-American branches, has tended to take its valuations from study of the lyric, and when it has discussed narrative has emphasized questions of 'point of view,' tone,' 'symbol,' 'spatial form,' or 'psychology.' The texture of narrative has been considered most interesting insofar as it approached the density of poetry. Plot has been disdained as the element of narrative that least sets off and defines high art -- indeed, plot is that which especially characterizes popular mass-consumption literature: plot is why we read Jaws, but not Henry James. And yet, one must in good logic argue that plot is somehow prior to those elements most discussed by most critics, since. it is the very organizing line, the thread of design, that makes narrative possible because finite and comprehensible. Aristotle, of course, recognized the logical priority of plot, and a recent critical tradition, starting with the Russian Formalists and coming up to the French and American 'narratologists,' has revived a quasi-Aristotelian sense of plot. [ . . . ]

There are evidently a number of different ways one might go about discussing the concept of plot and its function in the range of narrative forms. Plot is, first of all, a constant of all written and oral narrative, in that a narrative without at least a minimal plot would be incomprehensible. Plot is the principle of interconnectedness and intention which we cannot do without in moving through the discrete elements -- incidents, episodes, actions -- of a narrative: even such loosely articulated forms as the picaresque novel display devices of interconnectedness, structural repetitions that allow us to construct a whole; and we can make sense of such dense and seemingly chaotic texts as dreams because we use interpretive categories that enable us to reconstruct intentions and connections, to replot the dream as narrative. It would, then, be perfectly plausible to undertake a typology of plot and its elements from the Iliad and the Odyssey onward to the new novel and the 'metafictions' of our time. ¹ Yet it seems clear also that there have been some historical moments at which plot has assumed a greater importance than at others, moments in which cultures have seemed to develop an unquenchable thirst for plots and to seek the expression of central individual and collective meanings through narrative design. From sometime in the mideighteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, Western societies appear to have felt an extraordinary need or desire for plots, whether in fiction, history, philosophy, or any of the social sciences, which in fact largely came into being with the Enlightenment and Romanticism. As Voltaire announced and then the Romantics confirmed, history replaces theology as the key discourse and central imagination in that historical explanation becomes nearly a necessary factor of any thought about human society: the question of what we are typically must pass through the question of where we are, which in turn is interpreted to mean, how did we get to be there? Not only history but historiography, the philosophy of history, philology, mythography, diachronic linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology all establish their claim as fields of inquiry, and all respond to the need for an explanatory narrative that seeks its authority in a return to origins and the tracing of a coherent story forward from origin to present.

The enormous narrative production of the nineteenth century may suggest an anxiety at the loss of providential plots: the plotting of the individual or social or institutional life story takes on new urgency when one no longer can look to a sacred masterplot that organizes and explains the world. The emergence of narrative plot as a dominant mode of ordering and explanation may belong to the large process of secularization, dating from the Renaissance and gathering force during the Enlightenment, which marks a falling-away from those revealed plots -- the Chosen People, Redemption, the Second Coming -- that appeared to subsume transitory human time to the timeless. [ . . . ] By the end of the Enlightenment, there is no longer any consensus on this prediction, and no cultural cohesion around a point of fixity which allows thought and vision so to transfix time. And this may explain the nineteenth century's obsession with questions of origin, evolution, progress, genealogy, its foregrounding of the historical narrative as par excellence the necessary mode of explanation and understanding.

We still live today in the age of narrative plots, consuming avidly Harlequin romances and television serials and daily comic strips, creating and demanding narrative in the presentation of persons and news events and sports contests. [ . . . ] And yet, we know that with the advent of Modernism came an era of suspicion toward plot, engendered perhaps by an overelaboration of and overdependence on plots in the nineteenth century. [ . . . ] A reflection on plot as the syntax of a certain way of speaking our understanding of the world may tell us something about how and why we have come to stake so many of the central concerns of our society, and of our lives, on narrative.

II

Plot as it interests me is not a matter of typology or of fixed structures, but rather a structuring operation peculiar to those messages that are developed through temporal succession, the instrumental logic of a specific mode of human understanding. Plot, let us say in preliminary definition, is the logic and dynamic of narrative, and narrative itself a form of understanding and explanation.

Such a conception of plot seems to be at least compatible with Aristotle's understanding of mythos, the term from the Poetics that is normally translated as 'plot.' It is Aristotle's claim that plot (mythos) and action (praxis) are logically prior to the other parts of dramatic fictions, including character (ethos). Mythos is defined as 'the combination of the incidents, or things done in the story,' and Aristotle argues that of all the parts of the story, this is the most important. ² [ . . . ] Later in the same paragraph he reiterates, using an analogy that may prove helpful to thinking about plot: 'We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is Plot; and that the Characters come second -- compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple blackand-white sketch of a portrait.' Plot, then, is conceived to be the outline or armature of the story, that which supports and organizes the rest. From such a view, Aristotle proceeds to derive three consequences. First, the action imitated by the tragedy must be complete in itself. This in turn means that it must have a beginning, a middle, and an end -- a point wholly obvious but one that will prove to have interesting effects in its applications. Finally, just as in the visual arts a whole must be of a size that can be taken in by the eye, so a plot must be 'of a length to be taken in by the memory.' This is important, since memory -- as much in reading a novel as in seeing a play -- is the key faculty in the capacity to perceive relations of beginnings, middles, and ends through time, the shaping power of narrative.

But our English term 'plot' has its own semantic range, one that is interestingly broad and possibly instructive. [ . . . ] Common to the original sense of the word is the idea of boundedness, demarcation, the drawing of lines to mark off and order. This easily extends to the chart or diagram of the demarcated area, which in turn modulates to the outline of the literary work. From the organized space, plot becomes the organizing line, demarcating and diagramming that which was previously undifferentiated. We might think here of the geometrical expression, plotting points, or curves, on a graph by means of coordinates, as a way of locating something, perhaps oneself. The fourth sense of the word, the scheme or conspiracy, seems to have come into English through the contaminating influence of the French complot, and became widely known at the time of the Gunpowder Plot. I would suggest that in modern literature this sense of plot nearly always attaches itself to the others: the organizing line of plot is more often than not some scheme or machination, a concerted plan for the accomplishment of some purpose which goes against the ostensible and dominant legalities of the fictional world, the realization of a blocked and resisted desire. Plots are not simply organizing structures, they are also intentional structures, goaloriented and forward-moving.

Plot as we need and want the term is hence an embracing concept for the design and intention of narrative, a structure for those meanings that are developed through temporal succession, or perhaps better: a structuring operation elicited by, and made necessary by, those meanings that develop through succession and time. A further analysis of the question is suggested here by a distinction urged by the Russian Formalists, that between fabula and sjuet. Fabula is defined as the order of events referred to by the narrative, whereas sjuet is the order of events presented in the narrative discourse. [ . . . ] In the wake of the Russian Formalists, French structural analysts of narrative proposed their own pairs of terms, predominantly histoire (corresponding to fabula) and rcit, or else discours (corresponding to sjuet). English usage has been more unsettled. 'Story' and 'plot' would seem to be generally acceptable renderings in most circumstances, though a structural and semiotic analysis will find advantages in the less semantically charged formulation 'story' and 'discourse.' ³

'Plot' in fact seems to me to cut across the fabula/sjuet distinction in that to speak of plot is to consider both story elements and their ordering. Plot could be thought of as the interpretive activity elicited by the distinction between sjuet and fabula, the way we use the one against the other. To keep our terms straight without sacrificing the advantages of the semantic range of 'plot,' let us say that we can generally understand plot to be an aspect of sjuet in that it belongs to the narrative discourse, as its active shaping force, but that it makes sense (as indeed sjuet itself principally makes sense) as it is used to reflect on fabula, as our understanding of story. Plot is thus the dynamic shaping force of the narrative discourse. I find confirmation for such a view in Paul Ricur's definition of plot as 'the intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in any story.' Ricur continues, using the terms 'events' and 'story' rather than fabula and sjuet: 'This provisory definition immediately shows the plot's connecting function between an event or events and the story. A story is made out of events to the extent that plot makes events into a story. The plot, therefore, places us at the crossing point of temporality and narrativity . . .' ⁴ Ricur's emphasis on the constructive role of plot, its active, shaping function, offers a useful corrective to the structural narratologists' neglect of the dynamics of narrative and points us toward the reader's vital role in the understanding of plot.

Plot as a logic of narrative would hence seem to be analogous to the syntax of meanings that are temporally unfolded and recovered, meanings that cannot otherwise be created or understood. Genette's study of narrative discourse in reference to Proust leads him to note that one can tell a story without any reference to the place of its telling, the location from which it is proffered, but that one cannot tell a story without indications of the time of telling in relation to the told: the use of verb tenses, and their relation one to another, necessarily gives us a certain temporal place in relation to the story. Genette calls this discrepancy in the situation of time and place a 'dissymmetry' of the language code itself, 'the deep causes of which escape us.' ⁵ While Genette's point is valid and important in the context of linguistics and the philosophy of language, one might note that commonsensically the deep causes are evident to the point of banality, if also rather grim: that is, man is ambulatory, but he is mortal. [. . . ]

Walter Benjamin has made this point in the simplest and most extreme way, in claiming that what we seek in narrative fictions is that knowledge of death which is denied to us in our own lives: the death that writes finis to the life and therefore confers on it its meaning. 'Death,' says Benjamin, 'is the sanction of everything that the story can tell.' ⁶ Benjamin thus advances the ultimate argument for the necessary retrospectivity of narrative: that only the end can finally determine meaning, close the sentence as a signifying totality. Many of the most suggestive analysts of narrative have shared this conviction that the end writes the beginning and shapes the middle: Propp, for instance, and Frank Kermode, and Jean-Paul Sartre, in his distinction between living and telling, argued in La Nause. [ . . . ] We should here note that opposed to this view stand other analysts, such as Claude Bremond, or Jean Pouillon, who many years ago argued (as a Sartrean attempting to rescue narrative from the constraints Sartre found in it) that the preterite tense used classically in the novel is decoded by the reader as a kind of present, that of an action and a significance being forged before his eyes, in his hands, so to speak. ⁸ It is to my mind an interesting and not wholly resolvable question how much, and in what ways, we in reading image the pastness of the action presented, in most cases, in verbs in the past tense. [ . . . ] If the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic. [ . . . ]

III

In an essay called 'Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative,' Jonathan Culler has argued that we need to recognize that narrative proceeds according to a 'double logic,' in that at certain problematic moments story events seem to be produced by the requirements of the narrative discourse, its needs of meaning, rather than vice-versa, as we normally assume. ⁹ In other words, the apparently normal claim that fabula precedes sjuet, which is a reworking of the givens of fabula, must be reversed at problematic, challenging moments of narrative, to show that fabula is rather produced by the requirements of sjuet: that something must have happened because of the results that we know -- that, as Cynthia Chase puts it about Daniel Deronda's Jewishness, 'his origin is the effect of its effects.' ¹⁰ Culler cautions critics against the assumption that these two perspectives can be synthesized without contradiction.

The irreconcilability of the 'two logics' points to the peculiar work of understanding that narrative is called upon to perform, and to the paralogical status of its 'solutions.' Let me restate the problem in this way: prior events, causes, are so only retrospectively, in a reading back from the end. In this sense, the metaphoric work of eventual totalization determines the meaning and status of the metonymic work of sequence -- though it must also be claimed that the metonymies of the middle produced, gave birth to, the final metaphor. The contradiction may be in the very nature of narrative, which not only uses but is a double logic. The detective story, as a kind of dime-store modern version of 'wisdom literature,' is useful in displaying the double logic most overtly, using the plot of the inquest to find, or construct, a story of the crime which will offer just those features necessary to the thematic coherence we call a solution, while claiming, of course, that the solution has been made necessary by the crime. To quote Holmes at the end of another of his cases, that of 'The Naval Treaty': 'The principal difficulty in your case . . . lay in the fact of there being too much evidence. What was vital was overlaid and hidden by what was irrelevant. Of all the facts which were presented to us we had to pick just those which we deemed to be essential, and then piece them together in their order so as to reconstruct this very remarkable chain of events.' ¹¹ Here we have a clear ars poetica, of the detective and of the novelist, and of the plotting of narrative as an example of the mental operation described by Wallace Stevens as 'The poem of the mind in the act of finding/What will suffice.'

It would be my further claim that narrative's nature as a contradictious double logic tells us something about why we have and need narrative, and how the need to plot meanings is itself productive of narrative. We may explore this proposition by way of [ . . . ] Rousseau Confessions, and I shall use as my example from it the notorious episode that closes Book Two, the story of the stolen ribbon. Rousseau has been serving as a lackey in the household of Mme de Vercellis, and feeling that he [ . . .] is out of his place, misplaced, and therefore ever on the lookout for some special mark of favor that would indicate that Mme de Vercellis knows he is destined for better things. But she dies without any recognition of Rousseau, and without any legacy. In the ensuing liquidation of her household, Rousseau steals a little pink and silver ribbon, which is found in his room. Asked where he got it, he lies and says that Marion, a young peasant girl serving as a cook, gave it to him. Confronted with Marion, who calmly denies the allegation, Rousseau persists in his account, which leads Marion to exclaim, 'You are making me very unhappy, but I wouldn't want to be in your place.' ¹² In doubt as to the truth, the Comte de la Roque (Mme de Vercellis's heir) dismisses them both. Rousseau now goes on to image the probable future scenario of Marion's life: dismissed under the shadow of accusation, penniless, without recommendation or protection, what could become of her? Rousseau sketches with hypothetical certainty a career that would make her 'worse than myself,' that is, presumably, a prostitute. This cruel memory has continued to trouble him so that in his insomnias the figure of Marion comes to reproach him with the crime, as if it had been committed only yesterday, but he has never been able to bring himself to make a clean breast of it, even to his closest friend. In fact, the desire to deliver himself of the weight of this particular crime, he then tells us, contributed greatly to his decision to write his confessions.

The facts of the case and its consequences have thus far been presented by Rousseau the narrator in what he claims the reader cannot deny to be an open and straightforward confession. [ . . . ] Curiously, it was his friendship for her that caused the accusation. She was present in his thoughts, and he excused himself by way of the first object that occurred to him: 'je m'excusai sur le premier objet qui s'offrit.' This apparently gratuitous and aberrant choice of person to serve as victim -- unsettling in its suggestion of random vectors of plot -- then receives something closer to a motivation when Rousseau explains that he accused Marion of doing what he wanted to do: of having given him the ribbon since he intended to give it to her. Thus his amiti for Marion appears to partake of love, and he can imagine being the recipient of what he wanted to give, which allows of a further reversal when the love-offering is poisoned in its source: love veers to sadism. What prevents Rousseau from owning up and straightening out this tangled ribbon is not the fear of punishment but the fear of shame: 'I only saw the horror of being recognized, publicly declared, with myself present, thief, liar, false accuser.' As so often in the Confessions, it is the fear of judgment from the outside, judgment by those who cannot see the dispositions intrieures, that appears to motivate both bad behavior and the confession that such behavior necessitates: the fear of being judged as in a place where he does not belong produces both lies and confessions. [ . . . ]

Juxtaposed in the episode of the stolen ribbon as presented in the Confessions we have a straightforward account of narrative events, presented in their chronological order; a subsequent narrative of inner feelings and motives standing in stark contradiction to the narrative of events; a hallucinatory narrative of the hypothetical future of the other persona of the episode, Marion; and a narrative of the generation of the text of the Confessions, since the need to tell this story -- or these stories -- claims genetic force. Is there any way we can order these four elements in a logical discourse? Apparently not, since the very point of the discrepancy between the narrative of actions and narrative of internal dispositions is their fundamental lack of congruence, the inability of either ever fully to coincide with or explain the other. One could no doubt discover a motive of connection between the two through a psychoanalytic discourse: Rousseau provides a key for so doing when he introduces his desire for Marion into the scenario and suggests that somehow this desire produced effects opposite from what he intended, the subject and object of desire changed places, and love became sadistic. All this could be reconceptualized by way of Freud, most pertinently through the concept of denial, denegation. But to bring such a psychoanalytic discourse to bear would in fact be -- given the nature of Freud's analyses of the problem -- to add another layer of narrative, however illuminating, to those Rousseau has already piled up. It would not offer an escape from narrative.

Rousseau's narrative layerings suggest a failure to find a single answer to the question of where his proper place is, what his publicly declared name, rank, and character are to be. Always out of place, never coincident with his inner self in the eyes of others -- and thus in his behavior -- he is always going back over the traces of conduct and interior disposition, not to reconcile them -- which is impossible -- but to confess their irreconcilability, which generates Marion's future story and Rousseau's future confessions. In other words, the only ordering or solution to the problem in understanding Rousseau has set up here is more narrative. [ . . . ] To understand me, Rousseau says more than once in the Confessions, most impressively at the close of Book Four, the reader must follow me at every moment of my existence; and it will be up to the reader, not Rousseau, to assemble the elements of the narrative and determine what they mean. Thus what Rousseau must fear, in writing his Confessions, is not saying too much or speaking lies, but failing to say everything. In claiming the need to tout dire, Rousseau makes explicit that the contradictions encountered in the attempt to understand and present the self in all its truth provide a powerful narrative machine. Any time one goes over a moment of the past, the machine can be relied on to produce more narrative -- not only differing stories of the past, but future scenarios and narratives of writing itself. There is simply no end to narrative on this model, since there is no 'solution' to the 'crime.' ¹³ The narrative plotting in its entirety is the solution, and since that entirety has no endpoint for the writing -- as opposed to the biological -- self, Rousseau is reduced to requesting the reader's permission to make an end here: 'Qu'il me soit permis de n'en reparler jamais.'

If I emphasize plotting even more than plot, it is because the participle best suggests the dynamic aspect of narrative that most interests me: that which moves us forward as readers of the narrative text, that which makes us -- like the heroes of the text often, and certainly like their authors -- want and need plotting, seeking through the narrative text as it unfurls before us a precipitation of shape and meaning, some simulacrum of understanding of how meaning can be construed over and through time. I am convinced that the study of narrative needs to move beyond the various formalist criticisms that have predominated in our time: formalisms that have taught us much, but which ultimately -- as the later work of Barthes recognized -- cannot deal with the dynamics of texts as actualized in the reading process.

In the attempt to be beyond pure formalism -- while never discarding its lessons -- psychoanalysis promises, and requires, that in addition to such usual narratological preoccupations as function, sequence, and paradigm, we engage the dynamic of memory and the history of desire as they work to shape the recovery of meaning within time. Beyond formalism, Susan Sontag argued some years ago, we need an erotics of art. ¹⁴ What follows may be conceived as a contribution to that erotics, or, more soberly, a reading of our compulsions to read.

Notes