Dipple - Plot

This volume is one of a series of short studies, each dealing with a single key item, or a group of two or three key items, in our critical vocabulary. The purpose of the series differs from that served by the standard glossaries of literary terms. Many terms are adequately defined for the needs of students by the brief entries in these glossaries, and such terms will not be the subjects of studies in the present series. But there are other terms which cannot be made familiar by means of compact definitions. Students need to grow accustomed to them through simple and straightforward but reasonably full discussions of them. The purpose of this series is to provide such discussions.

Some of the terms in question refer to literary movements (e. g., Romanticism, Aestheticism, etc.), others to literary kinds (e. g., Comedy, Epic, etc.), and still others to stylistic features (e. g., Irony, The Conceit, etc.). Because of this diversity of subject- matter, no attempt has been made to impose a uniform pattern upon the studies. But all authors have tried to provide as full illustrative quotation as possible, to make reference whenever appropriate to more than one literature, and to compose their studies in such a way as to guide readers towards the short bibliographies in which they have made suggestions for further reading.

John D. Jump

University of Manchester

Plot currently has no strong place in the pantheon of acceptable literary terms. As a word, it has, in fact, been out of fashion since the anthropocentric surge of Romantic thought when the freedom to write plotlessly was, at least apparently, urged: the composing artist found various metaphors for himself such as that of the aeolian lyre being played upon by the spiritual wind of inspiration, but he was above all not an artisan arranging action according to a tight causal pattern of beginning, middle and end. Tristram Shandy as narrator expresses his freedom with characteristic bluntness: I should beg Mr Horaces pardon for in writing what I have set about I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any mans rules that ever lived. From the eighteenth century to the present, plot has had an automatic association with rules those rules begun so expansively by Aristotles apparent extrapolations from Greek drama and epic and narrowed so stringently by theoretical criticism of Aristotle, Horace and Plato in the late fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy and to a more limited extent in France and England.

The problem throughout has been one of reduction. Aristotles style is sparse although the Greek nouns he uses are highly rever- berative, and his words can be given a narrow literalness which is critically very unrewarding indeed. In certain ways the Italian theorists making their rules about plot reduced Aristotle as they thought to expand him, and we are the unfortunate sufferers in that we tend to have received both Aristotle and Horace through these transmitters. Alain Robbe-Grillet offers a healthy and much needed antidote to all such projections of authority ancient, Renaissance, or modern when he says that no work of art should have a traditionally prescribed pattern but must search out its own form and newness. It is crucial to point out that this does not imply that literature (in this case, the novel) must be plotless, but only that each work must seek its own plan.

Reduction in our thinking about plot also has other, less venerable causes. In some ways plot projects an almost industrial idea, in that it has affinities with the graph, the blueprint and all of the stalest, least interesting diagrams of human order of one sort or another. Almost everything from statistical analyses of the stock market to the Genesis account of Gods six days of creation can be graphed, plotted, seen as part of an orderly plan and superficially understood in this way. This view of plot is necessarily without literary, moral or symbolic value and is artistically unsatisfying: it has a non-literary inclusiveness which is quite repugnant to the mysteries of our trade. When a transference is made from this idea of plot as mathematical graph to literature, the most reduced form is the murder mystery in which every piece of data, both thing and event, is fitted into a jigsaw puzzle arrangement which is unravelled with precision at the end. We read murder mysteries not as a creative literary act, but as something like a means of testing our IQ and surely a literary term should encompass more than that.