PLOT
Robert Louis Stevenson, in his spirited essay entitled "A Humble
Remonstrance," has given very valuable advice to the writer of
narrative. In concluding his remarks he says, "And as the root of the
whole matter, let him bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript
of life, to be judged by its exactitude; but a simplification of some
side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant simplicity.
For although, in great men, working upon great motives, what
we observe and admire is often their complexity, yet underneath
appearances the truth remains unchanged: that simplification was their
method, and that simplicity is their excellence." Indeed, as we have
already noted in passing, simplification is the method of every art.
Every artist, in his own way, simplifies life: first by selecting
essentials from the helter-skelter of details that life presents
to him, and then by arranging these essentials in accordance with
a pattern. And we have noted also that the method of the artist in
narrative is to select events which bear an essential logical relation
to each other and then to arrange them along the lines of a pattern of
causation.
Of course the prime structural necessity in narrative, as indeed in
every method of discourse, is unity. Unity in any work of art can be
attained only by a definite decision of the artist as to what he is
trying to accomplish, and by a rigorous focus of attention on his
purpose to accomplish it,--a focus of attention so rigorous as
to exclude consideration of any matter which does not contribute,
directly or indirectly, to the furtherance of his aim. The purpose of
the artist in narrative is to represent a series of events--wherein
each event stands in a causal relation, direct or indirect, to its
logical predecessor and its logical successor in the series. Obviously
the only way to attain unity of narrative is to exclude consideration
of any event which does not, directly or indirectly, contribute to
the progress of the series. For this reason, Stevenson states in his
advice to the young writer, from which we have already quoted: "Let
him choose a motive, whether of character or passion: carefully
construct his plot so that every incident is an illustration of the
motive, and every property employed shall bear to it a near relation
of congruity or contrast; ... and allow neither himself in the
narrative, nor any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter
one sentence that is not part and parcel of the business of the story
or the discussion of the problem involved. Let him not regret if this
shortens his book; it will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter
is not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he miss a thousand
qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has
chosen." And earlier in the same essay, he says of the novel: "For
the welter of impressions, all forcible but all discreet, which life
presents, it substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions,
all indeed most feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect,
all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming together like consonant
notes in music or like the graduated tints in a good picture. From
all its chapters, from all its pages, from all its sentences,
the well-written novel echoes and re-echoes its one creative and
controlling thought; to this must every incident and character
contribute; the style must have been pitched in unison with this; and
if there is anywhere a word that looks another way, the book would be
stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller without it."
The only way in which the writer of narrative may attain the unity
that Stevenson has so eloquently pleaded for is to decide upon a
definite objective point, to bear in mind constantly the culmination
of his series of events, and to value the successive details of his
material only in so far as they contribute, directly or indirectly, to
the progress of the series toward that culmination. To say the thing
more simply, he must see the end of his story from the beginning and
must give the reader always a sense of rigorous movement toward that
end. His narrative, as a matter of construction, must be finished,
before, as a matter of writing, it is begun. He must know as
definitely as possible all that is to happen and all that is not to
happen in his story before he ventures to represent in words the very
first of his events. He must not, as some beginners try to do,
attempt to make his story up as he goes along; for unless he holds the
culmination of his series constantly in mind, he will not be able to
decide whether any event that suggests itself during the progress of
his composition does or does not form a logical factor in the series.
The preliminary process of construction may be accomplished in either
of two ways. Authors with synthetic minds will more naturally reason
from causes to effects; and authors with analytic minds will more
naturally reason from effects to causes. The former will construct
forward through time, the latter backward. Standing at the outset of a
narrative, it is possible to imagine forward along a series of
events until the logical culmination is divined; or standing at the
culmination, it is possible to imagine backward along the series
to its far-away beginnings. Thackeray apparently constructed in the
former manner; Guy de Maupassant apparently constructed in the
latter. The latter method--the method of building backward from the
culmination--is perhaps more efficacious toward the conservation of
the strictest unity. It seems on the whole a little easier to exclude
the extraneous in thinking from effects to causes than in thinking
from causes to effects, because analysis is a stricter and more
focused mood of mind than synthesis.
But in whichever way the process of construction be accomplished, the
best stories are always built before they are written; and that is
the reason why, in reading them, we feel at every point that we are
getting somewhere, and that the author is leading us step by step
toward a definite culmination. Although, as is usually the case, we
cannot, even midway through the story, foresee what the culmination is
to be, we feel a certain reassurance in the knowledge that the author
has foreseen it from the start. This feeling is one of the main
sources of interest in reading narrative. In looking on at life
itself, we are baffled by a muddle of events leading everywhither;
their succession is chaotic and lacking in design; they are not
marshaled and processional; and we have an uncomfortable feeling
that no mind but that of God can foresee their veiled and hidden
culminations. But in reading a narrative arrangement of life, we have
a comfortable sense of order, which comes of our knowledge that the
author knows beforehand whither the events are tending and can make us
understand the sequence of causation through which they are moving
to their ultimate result. He makes life more interesting by making
it more intelligible; and he does this mainly by his power of
construction.
The simplest of all structures for a narrative is a straightway
arrangement of events along a single strand of causation. In such
a narrative, the first event is the direct cause of the second,
the second of the third, the third of the fourth, and so on to the
culmination of the series. This very simple structure is exhibited in
many of the tales which have come down to us from early centuries.
It is frequently employed in the "Gesta Romanorum," and scarcely less
frequently in the "Decameron" of Boccaccio. It has the advantage of
being completely logical and entirely direct. But we feel, in reading
stories so constructed, that the method of simplification has been
carried too far, and that simplicity has therefore ceased to be an
excellence. Such a story is in this way misrepresentative of life:--it
fails utterly to suggest "the welter of impressions which life
presents," the sudden kaleidoscopic shifts of actual life from one
series of events to another, and the consequent intricacy and
apparent chaos of life's successive happenings. The structure is too
straightforward, too direct, too unwavering and unhesitant.
The simplest way to introduce the element of hesitance and wavering,
and thereby make the story more truly suggestive of the intricate
variety of life, is to interrupt the series by the introduction of
events whose apparent tendency is to hinder its progress, and in this
way emphasize the ultimate triumph of the series in attaining its
predestined culmination. Such events are not extraneous; because,
although they tend directly to dispute the progress of the series,
they tend also indirectly to further it through their failure to
arrest it. The events in any skilfully selected narrative may,
therefore, be divided into two classes: events direct or positive, and
events indirect or negative. By a direct, or positive, event is meant
one whose immediate tendency is to aid the progress of the series
toward its predetermined objective point; and by an indirect, or
negative, event is meant one whose immediate tendency is to thwart
this predetermined outcome. It would be an easy matter, for example,
in examining "Pilgrim's Progress," to class as positive those events
which directly further the advance of Christian toward the Celestial
City, and to class as negative those events whose immediate tendency
is to turn him aside from the straight and narrow path. And yet both
classes of events, positive and negative, make up really only a single
series; because the negative events are conquered one by one by the
preponderant power of the positive events, and contribute therefore
indirectly, through their failure, to the ultimate attainment of the
culmination.
When a straightway arrangement of positive events along a single
strand of causation is varied and emphasized in this way by the
admission of negative events, whose tendency is to thwart the progress
of the series, the structure may be made very suggestive of that
conflict of forces which we feel to be ever present in actual life.
This structure is exhibited, for example, in Hawthorne's little tale
of "David Swan." The point of the story is that nothing happens to
David; the interest of the story lies in the events that almost happen
to him. The young man falls asleep at noon-time under the shade of
a clump of maples which cluster around a spring beside the highroad.
Three people, or sets of people, observe him in his sleep. The first
would confer upon him Wealth, the second Love, the third Death, if he
should waken at the moment. But David Swan sleeps deeply; the people
pass on; and all that almost happened to him subsides forever to the
region of the might-have-been.
A simple series of this sort, wherein the events proceed, now
directly, now indirectly, along a single logical line, may be
succeeded by another simple series of the same sort, which in turn
may be succeeded by a third, and so on indefinitely. In this way is
constructed the type of story known as picaresque, because in Spain,
where the type was first developed, the hero was usually a _picaro_,
or rogue. The narrative expedient in such stories is merely to select
a hero capable of adventure, to fling him loose into the roaring and
tremendous world, and to let things happen to him one after another.
The most widely known example of the type is not a Spanish story, but
a French,--the "Gil Blas" of Alain Rene Le Sage. As soon as Gil Blas
arrives at the culmination of one series of adventures, the author
starts him on another. Each series is complete in itself and distinct
from all the rest; and the structure of the whole book may be likened,
in a homely figure, to a string of sausages. The relation between the
different sections of the story is not organic; they are merely tied
together by the continuance of the same central character from one to
another. Any one of the sections might be discarded without detriment
to the others; and the order of them might be rearranged. Plays, as
well as novels, have been constructed in this inorganic way,--for
example, Moliere's "L'Etourdi" and "Les Facheux." If the actors, in
performing either of these plays, should omit one or two units of the
sausage-string of incidents, the audience would not become aware of
any gap in structure. Yet a story built in this straightforward and
successive way may give a vast impression of the shifting maze of
life. Mr. Kipling's "Kim," which is picaresque in structure, shows us
nearly every aspect of the labyrinthine life of India. He selects a
healthy and normal, but not a clever, boy, and allows all India to
happen to him. The book is without beginning and without end; but
its very lack of neatness and compactness of plan contributes to the
general impression it gives of India's immensity.
But a simple series of events arranged along a single strand of
causation, or a succession of several series of this kind strung
along one after the other, may not properly be called a plot. The
word _plot_ signifies a weaving together; and a weaving together
presupposes the co-existence of more than one strand. The simplest
form of plot, properly so called, is a weaving together of two
distinct series of events; and the simplest way of weaving them
together is by so devising them that, though they may be widely
separate at their beginnings, they progress, each in its own way,
toward a common culmination,--a single momentous event which stands
therefore at the apex of each series. This event is the knot which
ties together the two strands of causation. Thus, in "Silas Marner,"
the culminating event, which is the redemption of Marner from a
misanthropic aloofness from life, through the influence of Eppie, a
child in need of love, is led up to by two distinct series of events,
of which it forms the knot. The one series, which concerns itself with
Marner, may be traced back to the unmerited wrong which he suffered in
his youth; and the other series, which concerns itself with Eppie, may
be traced back to the clandestine marriage of Eppie's father, Godfrey
Cass. The initial event of one series has no immediate logical
relation to the initial event of the other; but each series, as it
progresses, approaches nearer and nearer to the other, until they meet
and blend.
A type of plot more elaborate than this may be devised by leading up
to the culmination along three or more distinct lines of causation,
instead of merely two. In the "Tale of Two Cities," Sydney Carton's
voluntary death upon the scaffold stands at the apex of several series
of events. And a plot may be still further complicated by tying the
strands together at other points beside the culmination. In "The
Merchant of Venice," the two chief series of events are firmly knotted
in the trial scene, when Shylock is circumvented by Portia; but they
are also tied together, though less firmly, at the very outset of
the play, when Antonio borrows from Shylock the money which makes it
possible for Bassanio to woo and win the Lady of Belmont. Furthermore,
any event in one of the main strands of causation may stand at the
culmination of a minor strand, and thus may form a little knot in the
general network of the plot. In the same play, the minor strand of the
elopement of Lorenzo and Jessica attains its culmination in a scene
which stands only midway along the progress of the two main strands,
that of the bond and that of the caskets, toward their common result
in the defeat of Shylock.
But however intricately woven a plot may be, and however many minor
knots may tie together the various strands which enter into it, there
is almost always one point of greatest complication, one big knot
which ties together all the strands at once, and stands as the common
culmination of all the series, major and minor. The story concerns
itself chiefly with telling the reader how the major knot came to be
tied; but in a plot of any complexity, the reader naturally desires
to be told how the knot became untied again. Therefore this point
of greatest complication, this culmination of all the strands of
causation which are woven in the plot, this objective point of the
entire narrative, is seldom set at the very end of a story, but
usually at a point about three quarters of the way from the beginning
to the end. The first three quarters of the story, speaking roughly,
exhibit the antecedent causes of the major knot; and the last quarter
of the story exhibits its subsequent effects. A plot, therefore, in
its general aspects, may be figured as a complication followed by an
explication, a tying followed by an untying, or (to say the same
thing in French words which are perhaps more connotative) a _nouement_
followed by a _denouement_. The events in the _denouement_ bear
a closer logical relation to each other than the events in the
_nouement_, because all of them have a common cause in the major knot,
whereas the major knot is the ultimate effect of several distinct
series of causes which were quite separate one from another at the
time when the _nouement_ was begun. For this reason the _denouement_
shows usually a more hurried movement than the _nouement_,--one event
treading on another's heels.
Undoubtedly it was this threefold aspect of a plot--1. The
Complication; 2. The Major Knot; 3. The Explication--which Aristotle
had in mind when he stated that every story must have a beginning,
a middle, and an end. These words were not intended to connote a
quantitative equality. What Aristotle called the "middle" may, in a
modern novel, be stated in a single page, and is much more likely to
stand near the close of the book than at the center. But everything
that comes after it, in what Aristotle called the "end," should be an
effect of which it is the cause; and everything that comes before
it, in what Aristotle called the "beginning," should be, directly
or indirectly, a cause of which it is the effect. Only under these
conditions will the plot be, as Aristotle said it should be, an
organic whole. Only in this way can it conform to the principle of
unity, which is the first principle of all artistic endeavor.
Bearing the principle of unity ever in his mind, Stevenson, in a
phrase omitted for the moment in one of the quotations from "A Humble
Remonstrance" set forth at the beginning of this chapter, advised
the fiction-writer to "avoid a sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in
Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of the main
intrigue." It seems safe to state that a sub-plot is of use in a novel
only for the purpose of tying minor knots in the leading strands of
causation, and should be discarded unless it serves that purpose.
There is no reason, however, why a novel should not tell at once
several stories of equal importance, provided that these stories be
deftly interlinked, as in that masterpiece of plotting, "Our Mutual
Friend." In this novel, the chief expedient which Dickens has employed
to bind his different stories together is to make the same person
an actor in more than one of them, so that a particular event that
happens to him may be at the same time a factor in both one and the
other series of events. Through the skilful use of this expedient,
Dickens has contrived to give his novel unity of plot, in spite of
the diversity of its narrative elements. But on the other hand, in
"Middlemarch," George Eliot has told three stories instead of one. She
has failed to make her plot an organic whole by deftly interweaving
the three strands which she has spun. And therefore this monumental
novel, so great in other ways, is faulty in structure, because it
violates the principle of unity.
According to the extent of complication in the plot, novels may be
grouped into two classes,--the discursive and the compacted. Thackeray
wrote novels of the former type, Hawthorne of the latter. In "Vanity
Fair" there are over half a hundred characters; in "The Scarlet
Letter" there are three, or possibly four. The discursive novel gives
a more extensive, and the compacted novel a more intensive, view
of life. English authors for the most part have tended toward the
discursive type, and Continental authors toward the compacted. The
latter type demands a finer and a firmer art, the former a broader and
more catholic outlook on the world.
The distinction between the two types depends chiefly upon how much or
how little of his entire story the author chooses to tell. In actual
life, as was stated in a former chapter, there are no very ends; and
it may now be added that also there are no absolute beginnings.
Any event that happens is, in Whitman's words, "an acme of things
accomplished" and "an encloser of things to be"; and in thinking back
along its causes or forward along its effects, we may continue
the series until our thought loses itself in an eternity. In any
narrative, therefore, we are doomed to begin and end in mid-career;
and the question is merely how extended a section of the entire
imaginable and unimaginable series we shall choose to represent to the
reader. For instance, it would be a very simple matter to trace the
composition of Rossetti's "House of Life" back along a causal series
to the birth of a boy in Arezzo in 1304; for it is hardly likely that
Rossetti would have written a cycle of love sonnets if many other
poets, such as Shakespeare and Ronsard, had not done so before him;
and Shakespeare and Ronsard, as Mr. Sidney Lee has proved, were
literary legatees of Petrarch, the aforesaid native of Arezzo. And
yet, if we were to tell the story of how Rossetti's sonnets came to be
composed, it is doubtful if we should go further back in time than
the occasion when his friend Deverell introduced him to the beautiful
daughter of a Sheffield cutler who became the immediate inspiration of
his poetry of love.
Dickens, in many novels, of which "David Copperfield" may be taken as
an example, has chosen to tell the entire life-story of his hero from
birth up to maturity. But other novelists, like Mr. Meredith in "The
Egoist," have chosen to represent events that pass, for the most part,
in one place, and in an exceedingly short stretch of time. It is by
no means certain that Mr. Meredith does not know as much about the
boyhood and youth of Sir Willoughby Patterne as Dickens knew about
the early years of David Copperfield; but he has chosen to compact his
novel by presenting only a brief series of events which exhibit his
hero at maturity. Surely Turgenieff, after writing out that _dossier_
of each of his characters to which Mr. Henry James referred, must have
known a great many events in their lives which he chose to omit from
his finished novel. It is interesting to imagine the sort of plot that
George Eliot would have built out of the materials of "The Scarlet
Letter." Probably she would have begun the narrative in England at
the time when Hester was a young girl. She would have set forth the
meeting of Hester and Chillingworth and would have analyzed the causes
culminating in their marriage. Then she would have taken the couple
overseas to the colony of Massachusetts. Here Hester would have met
Arthur Dimmesdale; and George Eliot would have expended all her powers
as an analyist of life in tracing the sweet thoughts and imperious
desires that led the lovers to the dolorous pass. The fall of Hester
would have been the major knot in George Eliot's entire narrative. It
would have stood at the culmination of the _nouement_ of her plot: the
subsequent events would have been merely steps in the denouement. Yet
the fall of Hester was already a thing of the past at the outset of
the story that Hawthorne chose to represent. He was interested only in
the after-effects of Hester's sin upon herself and her lover and her
husband. The major knot, or culmination, of his plot was therefore the
revelation of the scarlet letter,--a scene which would have been only
an incident in George Eliot's _denouement_. It will be seen from
this that any story which is extended in its implications may offer a
novelist materials for any one of several plot-structures, according
to whichever section of the entire story happens most to interest his
mind.
It will be seen, also, that much of the entire story must, in any
case, remain unwritten. A plot is not only, as Stevenson stated, a
simplification of life; it is also a further simplification of the
train of events which, in simplifying life, the novelist has first
imagined. The entire story, with all its implications, is selected
from life; and the plot is then selected from the entire story. Often
a novelist may suggest as much through deliberately omitting from
his plot certain events in his imagined story as he could suggest
by representing them. Perhaps the most powerful character in Mr.
Meredith's "Evan Harrington" is the great Mel, whose death is
announced in the very first sentence of the novel. Hawthorne, in
"The Marble Faun," never clears away the mystery of Miriam's shadowy
pursuer, nor tells us what became of Hilda when she disappeared for a
time from the sight and knowledge of her friends.
After the novelist has selected from his entire story the materials he
means to represent, and has patterned these materials into a plot,
he enjoys considerable liberty in regard to the point at which he
may commence his narrative. He may begin at the beginning of one or
another of his main strands of causation, as Scott usually does; or
he may adopt the Homeric device, commended by Horace, of plunging into
the midst of his plot and working his way back only afterward to its
beginning. In the first chapter of "Pendennis," the hero is seventeen
years old; the second chapter narrates the marriage of his father and
mother, and his own birth and boyhood; and at the outset of the third
chapter he is only sixteen years of age.
It is obvious that, so long as the novelist represents his events in
logical sequence, it is not at all necessary that he should present
them in chronological succession. Stories may be told backward through
time as well as forward. Thackeray often begins a chapter with an
event that happened one day, and ends it with an event that happened
several days before; he works his way backward from effects to causes,
instead of forward from causes to effects. In carrying on a plot
which is woven out of several strands, it is hardly ever possible to
represent events in uninterrupted chronological succession, even when
the author consistently works forward from causes to effects; for
after he has pursued one strand of his plot to a certain point
in time, he is obliged to turn backward several days or weeks, or
possibly a longer period, to pick up another strand and carry
it forward to the same point in time at which he left the first.
Retrogression in time, therefore, is frequently not only permissible
but necessary. But it is only common-sensible to state that
chronological sequence should be sacrificed merely for the sake of
making clear the logical relation of events; and whenever juggling
with chronology tends to obscure instead of clarify that logical
relation, it is evidence of an error of judgment on the part of the
narrator. Turgenieff is often guilty of this error of judgment. He has
a disconcerting habit of bringing a new character into the scene which
stands for the moment before the eye of the reader, and then turning
the narrative backward several years in order to recount the past
life of the newcomer. Frequently, before this parenthetic recital is
completed, the reader has forgotten the scene from which the author
turned to the digression.
In most plots, as has been stated, the _nouement_ is more significant
than the _denouement_, and the causes leading to the tying of the
major knot are more interesting than the effects traced during the
process of untying it. This is the reason why the culmination is
usually set well along toward the conclusion of the story. Sometimes
even, when the major knot has been tied with a Gordian intricacy, the
author sets it at the very end of his narrative, and suddenly cuts it
instead of carefully untying it. But there is no absolutely necessary
reason why it should stand at the end, or, as is more frequently the
case, at a point about three quarters through the story. It may even
be set at the very beginning; and the narrative may concern itself
entirely with an elaborate _denouement_. This is the case, for
example, in the detective story, where a very intricate knot is
assumed at the outset, and the narrative proceeds to exhibit the
prowess of the detective-hero in untying it.
A well-constructed plot, like any other sort of well-articulated
pattern, is interesting in itself; and certain novels and
short-stories, like Wilkie Collins' "Moonstone" and Poe's "Murders in
the Rue Morgue," maintain their interest almost through the element of
plot alone. But since the purpose of fiction is to represent reality,
a story will fail of the highest effect unless the people acting in
its pattern of events produce upon the reader the illusion of living
human beings. We must therefore turn our attention next to a study of
the element of character.