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Reading for the Plot
I
Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that
we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all
of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to
ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semiconscious, but virtually
uninterrupted monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and
reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of
our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several
stories not yet completed. The narrative impulse is as old as our oldest
literature: myth and folktale appear to be stories we recount in order to
explain and understand where no other form of explanation will work. The
desire and the competence to tell stories also reach back to an early stage
in the individual's development, to about the age of three, when a child
begins to show the ability to put together a narrative in coherent fashion
and especially the capacity to recognize narratives, to judge their well-
formedness. Children quickly become virtual Aristotelians, insisting upon
any storyteller's observation of the "rules," upon proper beginnings,
middles, and particularly ends. Narrative may be a special ability or
competence that we learn, a certain subset of the general language code
which, when mastered, allows us to summarize and retransmit narratives in
other words and other languages, to transfer them into other media, while
remaining recognizably faithful to the original narrative structure and
message.
Narrative in fact seems to hold a special place among literary forms-as
something more than a conventional "genre"-because of its potential for
summary and retransmission: the fact that we can still recognize "the
story" even when its medium has been considerably changed. This
characteristic of narrative has led some theorists to suppose that it is
itself a language, with its own code and its own rules for forming messages
from the code, a hypothesis that probably does not hold up to inspection
because narrative appears always to depend on some other language code in
the creation of its meanings. But it does need to be considered as an
operation important to all of our lives. When we "tell a story," there
tends to be a shift in the register of our voices, enclosing and setting
off the narrative almost in the manner of the traditional "once upon a
time" and "they lived happily ever after": narrative demarcates, encloses,
establishes limits, orders! And if it may be an impossibly speculative task
to say what narrative itself is, it may be useful and valuable to think
about the kinds of ordering it uses and creates, about the figures of
design it makes. Here, I think, we can find our most useful object of
attention in what has for
centuries gone by the name of plot.
"Reading fortfie "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. When E. M. Forster, in the once influental
Aspects of the Novel, asserts that Aristode's emphasis on plot was
mistaken, that our interest is not in the "imitation of an action" but
rather in the "secret life which each of us lives privately," he surely
begs the question, for if "secret lives" are to be narratable, they must in
some sense be plotted, display a design and logic.1
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 narrative without at least a minimal plot would be
incomprehensible. Plot is the principle of interconnect-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 cat-legories that enable us to recoristrjact 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.2 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 mid-eighteenth 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 Enlightenment and Romanticism. As Voltaire announced and then
the Romantics confirmed, history replaces.



narrative as par excellence the necessary mode of explanation and
understanding.3
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. For all the widely publicized nonnarrative or
antinarrative forms of thought that are supposed I to characterize our
times, from complementarity and uncertainty in physics to the synchronic
analyses of structuralism, we remain .more determined by narrative than we
might wish to believe. And yet, we know that with the advent of
ModernisnTcamean era of suspicion toward plot^engendered perhaps by an
oyerelaboration of and overdependlence"on plots in the nineteenth century.
If we cannordo'without plots,"we nonetheless feel uneasy about them, and
feel obliged to show up their arbitrariness, to parody their mechanisms
while admitting our dependence on them. Until such a time as we cease to
exchange understandings in me form of stories, we will need to remain
dependent on the logic we use to i shape and to understand stories, which
is to say, dependent on plot. 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
These sweeping generalizations will bear more careful consideration later
on. It is important at this point to consider more closely just how we
intend to speak of plot, how we intend to work with it, to make it an
operative analytic and critical tool in the study of narrative. I want to
urge a conception of plot as something in the nature of the logic of
narrative discourse, the organizing dynamic of a specific mode of human
understanding. This pursuit will in a moment take us into the discussion of
narrative by a number of critics (of the type recently baptized
narratologists), but perhaps the best way to begin is through a brief
exercise in an old and thoroughly discredited form, the plot summary, in
this case of a very old story. Here, then, is the summary of a story from
the Grimm brothers, known in their version as "All-Kinds-of-Fur":4
A dying queen makes her husband promise that he will remarry only with a
woman as beautiful as she, with the same golden hair. He promises, and she
dies. Time passes, and he is urged by his councilors to remarry. He looks
for the dead queen's equal, but finds no one; until, years later, his eyes
light on his daughter, who looks just like her mother, with the same golden
hair. He will marry her, though his councilors say he must not. Pressed to
answer, the daughter makes her consent contingent on the performance of
three apparently impossible tasks: he must give her three dresses, one as
golden as the sun, one as silvery as the moon, the third as glittering as
all the stars, plus a cloak made of a thousand different furs. The king, in
fact, succeeds in providing these and insists on the marriage. The daughter
then flees, blackens her face and hands, covers herself with the cloak of
furs, and hides in the woods, where she is captured as a strange animal by
the king of another country. She goes to work as a scullery maid in his
kitchens, but on three successive occasions she appears at the king's
parties clothed in one of her three splendid dresses and dances with him;
and three times she cooks the king's pudding and leaves in the bottom of
the dish one of the tokens she has brought from home (a golden ring, a
golden spinning wheel, a golden reel). On the third repetition, the king
slips the ring on her finger while they are dancing, and when she returns
to the kitchen, in her haste she does not blacken one hand entirely. The
king searches her out, notices the white finger and its ring, seizes her
hand, strips off the fur cloak to reveal the dress underneath, and the
golden hair, and claims her in marriage. What have we witnessed and
understood here? How have we moved from one desire that we, like the king's
councilors know to be prohibited, to a legitimate desire whose consummation
marks end of the tale? And what is the meaning of the process lying e ween
beginning and end-a treble testing, with the supplemental requirement of
the cloak; flight and disguise ( using the cloak to become subhuman, almost
a beast); then a sort of striptease
revelation, also treble, using the three dresses provided by the father and
the three golden objects brought from home (tokens, perhaps, of the
mother), followed by recognition? How have we crossed from one kingdom to
another through those woods which, we must infer, border on both of them?
We cannot really answer such questions, yet we would probably all agree
that the middle of the tale offers a kind of minimum satisfactory process
that works through the problem of desire gone wrong and brings it to its
cure. It is a process in which the overly eroticized object-the daughter
become object of desire to the father-loses all erotic and feminine '
attributes, becomes unavailable to desire, then slowly, through repetition
by three (which is perhaps the minimum repetition to suggest series and
process), reveal her nature as erotic object again but now in a situation
where the erotic is permitted and fitting. The tale is characterized by
that laconic chasteness which Walter Benjamin found characteristic of the
great oral stories, a refusal of psychological explanation and motivation.5
It matter-of-factly takes on the central issues of culture-incest, the need
for exogamy-without commentary. Like a number of the Grimms' tales, it
seems to ask the question, Why do girls grow up, leave their homes and
their fathers, and marry other men? It answers the question without
explanation, through description of what needs to happen, the process set
in motion, when normal forms are threatened, go awry: as in "Hawthorn
Blossom" (the Grimms' version of "Sleeping Beauty"), we are given a kind of
counter-example, the working-out of an antidote. The tale appears as the
species of explanation that we give when explanation, in the logical and
discursive sense, seems impossible or impertinent. It thus transmits a kind
of wisdom that itself concerns transmission: how we pass on what we know
about how life goes forward.
Folktale and myth may be seen to show narrative as a form of thinking, a
way of reasoning about a situation. As Claude Levi-Strauss has argued, the
Oedipus myth may be "about" the unsolv-able problem of man's origins-born
from the earth or from parents-a "chicken or egg" problem that finds its
mythic "solution" in a story about generational confusion: Oedipus violates
the demarcations of generations, becomes the "impossible" combination of
son/husband, father/brother, and so on, subverting (and thus perhaps
reinforcing) both cultural distinctions and categories of thought. It is
the ordering of the inexplicable and impossible situation as narrative that
somehow mediates and forcefully connects its discrete elements, so that we
accept the necessity of what cannot logically be discoursed of. Yet I don't
think we do justice to our experience of " All-Kinds-of-Fur" or the Oedipus
myth in reducing their narratives-as Levi-Strauss suggests all mythic
narratives can be reduced-to their "aternporal matrix structure," a set of
basic cultural antinomies that the narrative mediates.6 NoFcan we, to be
sure, analyze these narratives simply as a pure succession of events or
happenings. "We need to recognize, for instance, that there is a dynamic
logic at work in the transformations wrought between the start and the
finish of "All-Kinds-of-Fur," a logic which makes sense of succession and
time, and which insists that mediation of the problem posed at the outset
takes time: that the meaning dealt with by narrative, and thus perhaps
narrative's raison d'etre, is of and in time. 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 Anstode's claim that plot (my-thos) 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. It
is worth quoting his claim once more:
Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life,
of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of
action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a
quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions-what we do-
that we are happy or the.reverse. In a play accordingly they do not act in
order to portray the Characters; they include the Characters for the sake
of the action. So that It is the action in it, i.e. its Fable of Plot, that
is the end and purpose of the tragedy; and the end is everywhere the chief
thing.7
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 pairiting, where the most
beautiful colours laid on without order will not give onethe same pleasure
as a simple black-and-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 rnust be "of a
length to be taken in by the memory." This is important, since memory - as
much in reading 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. The Oxford English Dictionary
gives seven definitions, essentially, which the American Heritage
Dictionary helpfully reduces to four categories:
1. (a) A small piece of ground, generally used for a specific purpose, (b)
A measured area of land; lot.
2. A ground plan, as for a building; chart; diagram.
3. The series of events consisting of an outline of the action of a
narrative or drama.
4. A secret plan to accomplish a hostile or illegal purpose;
scheme.
There may be a subterranean logic connecting these heterogeneous meanings.\
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 undif-ferentiated. 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 mat 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 do'mmant legalities of the fictional world, the
realization of a blocked and resisted desire. Plots are not simply
organizing structures! they are also intentional structures, goal-oriented
and forward-movimg.
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 rthat
are developed through temporal succession, or perhaps better: a structuring
operation elicited by, and made necessary by, those meanirigs that develop
through succession and time. A (further analysis of the question is
suggested here by a distinction j urged by the Russian Formalists, that
between fabula and sjuiet.Fabula is defined as the order of events referred
to by the narrative, whereas sjuzet is the order of events presented in the
narrative discourse. The distinction is one that takes on evident analytic
force when one is talking about a Conrad or a Faulkner, whose dislocations
of normal chronology are radical and significant, but it is no less
important in thinking about apparently more straightforward narratives,
since any narrative presents a selection and an ordering of material. We
must, however, recognize that the apparent priority of fabula to sjuzet is
in the nature of a mimetic illusion, in that the fabula-"what really
happened"-is in fact a mental construction that the reader derives from the
sjuzet, which is all that he ever directly knows. This differing status of
the two terms by no means invalidates tfie distinction itself, which is
central to our thinking about narrative and necessary to its analysis since
it allows us to juxtapose two modes of order and in the juxtaposing _
to see how ordering takes place.In the wake of the Russian Formalists,
French structural analysts of narrative proposed their own pairs of terms,
predominantly histoire (corresponding to fabula) and recit, or else
discours (corresponding to sjuzet). 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."8
"Plot" in fact seems to me to cut across the fabula/sjuzet distinction in
that to spaek 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 sjuzet 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 understand plot to be an
aspect of sjuzet in that it belongs to the narrative discourse, as its
active shaping force, but that it makes sense (as indeed sjuzet 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 Ricoeur's
definition of plot as "the intelligible whole that governs a succession of
events in any story"." Ricoeur continues, using the terms "events" and
"story"
rather than fabula and sjuzet: "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. . . ,"9 Ricoeur'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.
The Russian Formalists presented what one might call a "con-structivist"
view of literature, calling attention to the material and the means of its
making, showing how a given work is put together. "Device" is one of their
favorite terms-a term for demonstrating the technical use of a given motif
or incident or theme. Typical is Boris Tomachevsky's well-known
illustration of the technical sense of "motivation": if a character in a
play hammers a nail into the wall in Act I, then he or another character
will have to hang himself from it in Act III. The work of Tomachevsky,
Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum is invaluable to the student of
narrative since it so often cuts through thematic material to show the
constructed armature that supports it.10 Perhaps the instance of the
Russian Formalists' work most compelling for ourpurposes is their effort
to isolate and identify me minimal units of narrative and then to formulate
the principles of their combination and interconnection. In particular,
Vladimir Propp's The Morphology of the Folktale merits attention as an
early and impressive example of what can be done to formalize and codify
the study of narrative.
Faced with the mass of material collected by folklorists and the
inadequacy of attempts to order it through thematic groupings or /patterns
of derivation,Propp began with a gesture similar to that of Ferdinand de
Saussure at the inception of modern linguistics, bracketing questions of
origin and derivation and reference in order to find the principles of a
morphology of a given body of material, t taking some one hundred tales
classified by folklorists as fairy tales, he sought to provide a
description of the fairy tale according to its component parts, the
relation of these parts to one another and to the tale as a whole, and
hence the basis for a comparison among tales. Propp claims that the
essential morphological
components are function and sequence. One identifies the functions by
breaking down the tale into elements defined not by theme or character but
rather according to the actions performed: function is "an act of
character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the
course of the action."11 Functions will thus appear in the analysis as
labels for kinds of action, such as "interdiction," "testing," "acquisition
of the magical agent," and so on; whereas sequence will concern the order
of the functions, the logic of their consecution. As a result of his study,
Propp with a certain bravado puts forward four theses concerning the fairy
tale:
1. The functions are stable, constant elements whoever carries them out.
2. The number of functions is limited (there are just thirty-one in the
Russian fairy tale).
3. The sequence of functions is always identical (not all are present in
every tale, but the sequence of those present is invariable).
4. All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure.
Whatever the validity of Propp's theses, the concept of function, and the
"functionalist" view of narrative structure it implies, stresses in a
useful way the role of verbs of action as the armature of narrative, their
logic and articulation and sequence. Propp suggests an approach to the
analysis of narrative actions by giving precedence to mythos over ethos,
indeed by abstracting plot structure from the persons who carry it out.
Characters for Propp are essentially agents of the action; he reduces them
to seven "dramatis personae"defines by the "spheres of influence" of the
actions they perform: the Villain, the Donor, the Helper, the Princess and
her Father (who together function as a single agent), the Dispatcher, the
Hero, and the False Hero. The names that an individual tale will assign to
these agents-and the way it may combine or divide them-are relatively
unimportant, as are their attributes and motivations. What counts is their
role as vehicles of the action, their placement and appearance in order to
make sure that the Hero is dispatched, for instance, or that he is
presented with false claims that he must expose and overcome. Propp's
analysis clearly is limited by the relatively simple and formulaic nature
of the narratives he discusses. Yet something like the concept of
"function" may be necessary in any discussion of plot, in that it gives us
a way to think about what happens in narrative from the point of view of
its significance to the course of the action as a whole, the articulation
of narrative as a structure of actions.
Propp's insistence on sequence and function results in a "syn-tagmatic"
analysis, that is, one concerned with the combination of units along a
horizontal axis, as in a sentence. Within French structuralism, there has
rather been a strong emphasis on the "paradigmatic," an attention to the
vertical axis which represents the grammar and lexicon of narrative, the
elements and sets of relations which an individual narrative must call upon
and activate.12 Levi-Strauss's interest in the "atemporal matrix structure"
of narrative, the basic set of relationships which underlies and generates
any given mythic narrative, is an example. So is the work of the
semiotician A. J. Greimas, who takes Propp's analysis and, in the spirit of
Levi-Strauss, tries to reformulate the seven "dramatis per-sonae" in the
form of a matrix structure, a set of symmetrical oppositions which defines
a kind of field of force. Greimas offers a taxonomy whose inherent tensions
generate the production of narrative. It looks like this:
->. Receiver
Opposer
Sender
Helper
Without giving a full exposition of what Greimas calls his modele actantiel
- the dramatis personae have been rebaptized actants, emphasizing their
quality of agency - one can see that the tale is conceived as a set of
vectors, where the Hero's (the Subject's) search for the Object (the
Princess, for instance) is helped or hindered, while the Object of the
seach itself (herself) is sent, or given, or put in the way of being
obtained. The dotted line between Subject and Receiver indicates that very
often these two coincide: the Hero is working for himself.13
The language used by Greimas-especially Subject and Object, but also Sender
(Destinateur) and Receiver (Destinataire)-indicate that he is working also
under the influence of a linguistic model, so central to structuralist
thought in general. The work of Propp and other Russian Formalists has
proved susceptible of a reformulation by way of the linguistic model, by
structuralists concerned to provide a general poetics of narrative (or
"narratology"), that is, the conditions of meaning, the grammar and the
syntax of narrative forms. Tzvetan Todorov (who more than anyone else
introduced the ideas of the Russian Formalists into French structuralism)
works, for instance, from the postulate of a "universal grammar" of
narrative. Starting from a general analogy of narrative to a sentence writ
large, Todorov postulates that the basic unit of narrative (like Propp's
function) a clause, while the agents are proper nouns, semantically void
until predicated. The predicate terms are verbs (actions) and adjective
(states of being). His analysis proceeds largely with the study of verbs,
the most important component of narrative, which have status (positive or
negative), mood (imperative, optative, declarative, etc.), aspect
(indicative, subjunctive), voice (passive or active). Clauses combine in
different manners to form sequences, and complete narrative sequences are
recognizable from their accomplishment of a transformation of the initial
verb, now changed in status, mood, aspect, or by an added auxiliary verb.
Todorov best represents the linguistic model, applied to narrative
analysis, in its most developed form. But such work is no doubt less
valuable as a systematic model for analysis than as a suggestive metaphor,
alerting us to the important analogies between parts of speech and parts of
narrative, encouraging us to think about narrative as system, with
something that approximates a grammar and rules of ordering that
approximate a syntax. Perhaps the most challenging work to come out of
narratology has used the linguistic model in somewhat playful ways,
accepting it as a necessary basis for thought but opening up its
implications in an engagement with the reading of texts. What I have most
in mind here is Roland.

.digmatic model, Barthes's allegiances to the "writeable text" (texte
scriptible: that which allows and requires the greatest constructive effort
by the reader) and to the practice of "new new novelists" make him tend to
disparage his irreversible codes as belonging to an outmoded ideology, and
to reserve his greatest admiration for the symbolic ("Voice of the Text"),
which allows one to enter the text anywhere and to play with its stagings
of language itself.
Some correction of perspective is provided by Gerard Genette in Narrative
Discourse, which along with the work of Todorov and Barthes constitutes the
most significant contribution of the French structuralist tradition to
thinking about narrative. In his careful and subtle study of the
relationships among story, plot, and narrating, Genette pays close
attention to the functioning of the infinitely variable gearbox that links
the told to the ways of its telling, and how the narrative discourse-his
principal example is Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu-works to
subvert, replay, or even pervert the normal passages of time.18 Noting the
inescapable linearity of the linguistic signifier, Genette faces most
directly the paradox of form and temporality when he points out that
narrative j as we commonly know it-as a book, for instance-literally a
spatial form an object, but that its realization depends on its being gone
through in sequence and succession, and that it thus metonymicafiy
"borrows" a temporality from the time of its reading: what he calls a
"pseudo-time" of the text.19
Genette thus offers a kind of minimalist solution to the question of
structure and temporality, and dissents in part from the structural
narratologists' excessive emphasis on the paradigmatic, their failure to
engage the movement and dynamic of narrative. Ge-nette's solution may be
too cautious. For not only does the reading of narrative take time; the
time it takes, to get from beginning to end-particularly in those instances
of narrative that most define our sense of the mode, nineteenth-century
novels-is very much part of our sense of the narrative, what it has
accomplished, what it means. Lyric poetry, we feel, strives toward an ideal
simultaneity of meaning^encouraging us to read backward as well as forward
(through rhyme arid repetition, for instance), to grasp the whole in one
visual and auditory image; and expository argument, while it can have
narrative, generally seeks to suppresses force in favor of an atemporal
structure of understanding; whereas narrative stories depend on meanings
delayed, partially filled in, stretched out. Unlike philosophical
syllogisms, narratives ("All-Kinds-of-Fur," for example) are temporal
syllogisms, concerning the connective processes of time. lt is, I think, no
accident that most of the great examples of narrative are long and can
occupy our reading time over days or weeks or more: if we think of the
effects of serialization (which, monthly, weekly, or even daily, was the
medium of publication for many of the great nineteenth-century novels) we
can perhaps grasp more nearly how time in the representing is felt to be a
necessary analogue of time represented. As Rousseau contends in the preface
to La Nouvelle Heloise, a novel that in so many ways announces the
nineteenth-century tradition, to understand his characters one must know
them both young and old, and know them through the process of aging and
change that lies in between, a process worked out over a stretch of
pages.20 And Proust's narrator says much the same thing at the end of Le
Temps retrouve, where-in the shadow of impending death-he resolves to
dedicate himself to the creation of a novel that will, of necessity, have
"the shape of time."21
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
whici 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."22 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. Temporality is a problem, and an irreducible factor of any
narrative statement, in a way that location is not: "All-Kinds-of-Fur" can
be articulated from anywhere, but it needs to observe the sequence of
tenses and the succession of events. It is my simple conviction, then, that
narrative has something to do with time-boundedness, and that plot is the
internal logic of the discourse of mortality.
Waiter Benjamin has made thfs~poiht 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
storyteller can tell.23Behjamin thus advances the ultimate argument for the
necessary retrospectivity of narrative: that only the end can finally
determine meaning, close the sentence as a sighfying totality. Many of the
most suggestive analys 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 Nausie, where in telling everything is
transformed by the structuring presence of the end to come, and narrative
in fact proceeds "in the reverse"; or, as Sartre puts it in respect to
autobiographical narration in Les Mots, in order to tell his story in terms
of the meaning it would acquire only at the end, "I became my own
obituary."24 These are arguments to which we will need to return in more
detail. 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.25 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 on the one hand we realize the action
progressively, segment by segment, as a kind of present in terms of our
experience of it-the present of an argument, as in my summary of "All-Kinds-
of-Fur"-do we not do so precisely in anticipation of its larger hermeneutic
structuring by conclusions? We are frustrated by narrative interminable,
even if we know that any termmation is artificial, and that the_imposition
of ending may lead to that resistance to the end which Freud found in his
patients and which is an important novelist dynamic in such
writers as Stendhal and Gide. 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 reachjt. Perhaps we would
do best to speak the anticipation of retrospestion as our chief tool in
making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic.We have no
doubt forgone eternal narrative ends, and even traditional nineteenth-
century ends are subject to self- conscious endgames, yet still we read in
a spirit of confidence, and щ j also a state of dependence, that what
remains to be read will re-j structure the provisional meanings of the
already read.