Reading for the Plot PDF

[ 15 ] Reading for the Plot. peter brooks 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 our- selves in an episodic, s...

[ 15 ] Reading for the Plot. peter brooks 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 our- selves 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 proj- ects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet com- pleted. 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 compe- tence 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 obser- vation 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 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 ap- proached 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 ‘‘narratolo- gists,’’ has revived a quasi-Aristotelian sense of plot. When E. M. Forster, in the once influential Aspects of the Novel, asserts that Aristotle’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.∞ 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 pica- 202 ] peter brooks resque 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 catego- ries 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.≤ 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 cen- tury, Western societies appear to have felt an extraordinary need or desire for plots, whether in fiction, history, philosophy, or any of the social sci- ences, 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 philos- ophy of history, philology, mythography, diachronic linguistics, anthropol- ogy, 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 sug- gest 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 explana- tion 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. In the last two books of Paradise Lost, Milton’s angel Michael is able to present a full panorama of human history to Adam, concluding in redemption and a timeless future of bliss; and Adam responds: reading for the plot [ 203  How soon hath thy prediction, Seer Blest, Measur’d this transient World, the Race of time, Till time stand fixt: beyond is all abyss, Eternity, whose end no eye can reach. (book 12, lines 553–56) 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 Harle- quin 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 to characterize our times, from comple- mentarity and uncertainty in physics to the synchronic analyses of struc- turalism, we remain more determined by narrative than we might wish to believe. 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. If we cannot do without plots, we nonetheless feel uneasy about them, and feel obliged to show up their arbitrariness, to parody their mechanisms while admitting our depen- dence on them. Until such a time as we cease to exchange understandings in the form of stories, we will need to remain dependent on the logic we use to 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 understand- ing 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 concep- tion of plot as something in the nature of the logic of narrative discourse, the organizing dynamic of a specific mode of human understanding. This 204 ] peter brooks 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’’:∂ 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 the end of the tale? And what is the meaning of the process lying between 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 reading for the plot [ 205 both of them? We cannot really answer such questions, yet we would proba- bly 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 daugh- ter 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 pro- cess), reveals 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.∑ 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 de- scription 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 im- possible or impertinent. It thus transmits a kind of wisdom that itself con- cerns 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 Lévi-Strauss has argued, the Oedipus myth may be ‘‘about’’ the unsolvable 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’’ com- bination 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 Lévi-Strauss suggests all mythic nar- ratives can be reduced—to their ‘‘atemporal matrix structure,’’ a set of basic cultural antinomies that the narrative mediates.∏ Nor can we, to be sure, analyze these narratives simply as a pure succession of events or happenings. 206 ] peter brooks 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’être, 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 defi- nition, 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 trans- lated 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. 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 ac- tion. So that it is the action in it, i.e. its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy; and the end is everywhere the chief thing.π Later in the same paragraph he reiterates, using an analogy that may prove helpful to thinking about plot: ‘‘We maintain, therefore, that the first essen- tial, 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 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 reading for the plot [ 207 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. 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 mean- ings. 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, plot- ting 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 con- taminating 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, goal-oriented 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 208 ] peter brooks here by a distinction urged by the Russian formalists, that between fabula and sjužet. Fabula is defined as the order of events referred to by the narra- tive, whereas sjužet is the order of events presented in the narrative dis- course. The distinction is one that takes on evident analytic force when one is talking about a Conrad or a Faulkner, whose dislocations of normal chro- nology are radical and significant, but it is no less important in thinking about apparently more straightforward narratives, since any narrative pres- ents a selection and an ordering of material. We must, however, recognize that the apparent priority of fabula to sjužet 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 sjužet, which is all that he ever directly knows. This differing status of the two terms by no means invali- dates the 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 récit, or else discours (corresponding to sjužet). 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.’’∫ ‘‘Plot’’ in fact seems to me to cut across the fabula/sjužet 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 sjužet 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 sjužet in that it belongs to the narrative discourse, as its active shaping force, but that it makes sense (as indeed sjužet 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 sjužet: ‘‘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 reading for the plot [ 209 point of temporality and narrativity.’’Ω Ricoeur’s emphasis on the con- structive 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 ‘‘constructivist’’ 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 illustra- tion of the technical sense of ‘‘motivation’’: if a character in a play hammers a nail into the wall in act 1, then he or another character will have to hang himself from it in act 3. The work of Tomachevsky, Victor Shklovsky, and Boris Eichenbaum is invaluable to the student of narrative since it so often cuts through thematic material to show the constructed armature that sup- ports it.∞≠ Perhaps the instance of the Russian formalists’ work most com- pelling for our purposes is their effort to isolate and identify the 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 inade- quacy 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. 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.’’∞∞ Functions will thus appear in the analysis as labels for kinds of action, such as ‘‘inter- diction,’’ ‘‘testing,’’ ‘‘acquisition of the magical agent,’’ and so on; whereas sequence will concern the order of the functions, the logic of their consecu- tion. As a result of his study, Propp with a certain bravado puts forward four theses concerning the fairy tale: 210 ] peter brooks  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 Rus- sian 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 ab- stracting plot structure from the persons who carry it out. Characters for Propp are essentially agents of the action; he reduces them to seven ‘‘dra- matis personae,’’ defined 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 ‘‘syntagmatic’’ analysis, that is, one concerned with the combination of units along a hori- zontal 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 acti- vate.∞≤ Lévi-Strauss’s interest in the ‘‘atemporal matrix structure’’ of narra- tive, 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 Lévi-Strauss, tries to reformulate the seven ‘‘dramatis personae’’ in the form of a matrix struc- reading for the plot [ 211 ture, a set of symmetrical oppositions which defines a kind of field of force. Greimas offers a taxonomy whose inherent tensions generate the produc- tion of narrative. It looks like this: Sender Object Receiver Helper Subject Opposer Without giving a full exposition of what Greimas calls his modèle actantiel— the dramatis personae have been rebaptized actants, emphasizing their qual- ity 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 search itself (her- self ) 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.∞≥ The language used by Greimas—especially Subject and Object, but also Sender (Destinateur) and Receiver (Destinataire)—indicates that he is work- ing 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 ‘‘nar- ratology’’), that is, the conditions of meaning, the grammar and the syntax of narrative forms. Tzvetan Todorov (who more than anyone else intro- duced 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, To- dorov postulates that the basic unit of narrative (like Propp’s function) is a clause, while the agents are proper nouns, semantically void until predi- cated. The predicate terms are verbs (actions) and adjectives (states of be- ing). His analysis proceeds largely with the study of verbs, the most im- portant component of narrative, which have status (positive or negative), mood (imperative, optative, declarative, etc.), aspect (indicative, subjunc- tive), 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 analy- 212 ] peter brooks sis, 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 Barthes’s S/Z, a book that combines some of the rigors of structuralist analysis, in its patient tracing of five codes through a tale broken down into 561 lexias, with inter- spersed speculative excurses on narrative and its reading.∞∑ If we ask more specifically where in S/Z we find a notion approximating ‘‘plot,’’ I think the answer must be: in some combination of Barthes’s two irreversible codes—those that must be decoded successively, moving in one direction—the proairetic and the hermeneutic, that is: the code of actions (‘‘Voice of the Empirical’’) and the code of enigmas and answers (‘‘Voice of Truth’’). The proairetic concerns the logic of actions, how their completion can be derived from their initiation, how they form sequences. The limit- case of a purely proairetic narrative would be approached by the picaresque tale, or the novel of pure adventure: narratives that give precedence to the happening. The hermeneutic code concerns rather the questions and an- swers that structure a story, their suspense, partial unveiling, temporary blockage, eventual resolution, with the resulting creation of a ‘‘dilatory space’’—the space of suspense—which we work through toward what is felt to be, in classical narrative, the revelation of meaning that occurs when the narrative sentence reaches full predication. The clearest and purest example of the hermeneutic would no doubt be the detective story, in that everything in the story’s structure, and its temporality, depends on the resolution of enigma. Plot, then, might best be thought of as an ‘‘overcoding’’ of the proairetic by the hermeneutic, the latter structuring the discrete elements of the former into larger interpretive wholes, working out their play of meaning and significance. If we interpret the hermeneutic to be a general gnomic code, concerned not narrowly with enigma and its resolution but broadly with our understanding of how actions come to be semiotically structured, through an interrogation of their point, their goal, their import, we find that Barthes contributes to our conception of plot as part of the dynamics of reading. What may be most significant about S/Z is its break away from the reading for the plot [ 213 somewhat rigid notion of structure to the more fluid and dynamic notion of structuration. The text is seen as a texture or weaving of codes (using the etymological sense of ‘‘text’’) which the reader organizes and sorts out only in provisional ways, since he never can master it completely, indeed is him- self in part ‘‘undone’’ in his effort to unravel the text. The source of the codes is in what Barthes calls the déjà-lu, the already read (and the already written), in the writer’s and the reader’s experience of other literature, in a whole set of intertextual interlockings. In other words, structures, func- tions, sequences, plot, the possibility of following a narrative and making sense of it, belong to the reader’s literary competence, his training as a reader of narrative.∞∏ The reader is in this view himself virtually a text, a composite of all that he has read, or heard read, or imagined as written. Plot, as the interplay of two of Barthes’s codes, thus comes to appear one central way in which we as readers make sense, first of the text, and then, using the text as an interpretive model, of life. Plot—I continue to extrapolate from Barthes—is an interpretive structuring operation elicited, and necessitated, by those texts that we identify as narrative, where we know the meanings are developed over temporal succession in a suspense of final predication. As Barthes writes in an earlier essay (‘‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’’), what animates us as readers of narrative is la passion du sens, which I would want to translate as both the passion for meaning and the passion of meaning: the active quest of the reader for those shaping ends that, terminating the dynamic process of reading, promise to bestow mean- ing and significance on the beginning and the middle.∞π But what Barthes discusses less well is the relation of the sensemaking operations of reading to codes outside the text, to the structuring of ‘‘real- ity’’ by textual systems. He tends to dismiss the referential or cultural code (‘‘Voice of Science’’) as a ‘‘babble’’ conveying a society’s received opinions and stereotypes. In particular, he does not pursue the questions of tem- porality raised by the irreversible nature of the proairetic and the her- meneutic codes. In the ‘‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narra- tive,’’ Barthes claims that time in narrative belongs only to the referent (to the fabula) and has nothing to do with the narrative discourse. And even in S/Z, which shows a diminished subservience to the paradigmatic model, Barthes’s allegiances to the ‘‘writeable text’’ (texte scriptible: that which al- lows 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 214 ] peter brooks 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 Gérard Genette in Narra- tive Discourse, which along with the work of Todorov and Barthes con- stitutes the most significant contribution of the French structuralist tradi- tion 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.∞∫ Noting the inescapable linearity of the linguistic signifier, Genette faces most directly the paradox of form and temporality when he points out that narrative as we commonly know it—as a book, for instance—is literally a spatial form, an object, but that its real- ization depends on its being gone through in sequence and succession, and that it thus metonymically ‘‘borrows’’ a temporality from the time of its reading: what he calls a ‘‘pseudo-time’’ of the text.∞Ω Genette thus offers a kind of minimalist solution to the question of structure and temporality, and dissents in part from the structural nar- ratologists’ excessive emphasis on the paradigmatic, their failure to engage the movement and dynamic of narrative. Genette’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 nar- rative 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 and repetition, for instance), to grasp the whole in one visual and auditory image; and expository argument, while it can have a narrative, generally seeks to suppress its force in favor of an atemporal structure of understanding; whereas narrative stories depend on meanings delayed, par- tially filled in, stretched out. Unlike philosophical syllogisms, narratives (‘‘All-Kinds-of-Fur,’’ for example) are temporal syllogisms, concerning the connective processes of time. It 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 reading for the plot [ 215 the representing is felt to be a necessary analogue of time represented. As Rousseau contends in the preface to La Nouvelle Héloïse, 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.≤≠ And Proust’s narrator says much the same thing at the end of Le Temps retrouvé, where—in the shadow of im- pending death—he resolves to dedicate himself to the creation of a novel that will, of necessity, have ‘‘the shape of time.’’≤∞ 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 narra- tive 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.’’≤≤ 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. 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 storyteller can tell.’’≤≥ Benjamin thus ad- vances 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 Nausée, where in 216 ] peter brooks 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.’’≤∂ 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.≤∑ 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, seg- ment 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 termination 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 novelistic 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 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. We have no doubt forgone eternal narrative ends, and even traditional nineteenth-century ends are subject to self-conscious end- games, yet still we read in a spirit of confidence, and also a state of depen- dence, that what remains to be read will restructure the provisional mean- ings of the already read. Notes 1. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), p. 126. 2. One of the ambitions of Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) is to provide such a typology in his mythoi. Yet there is in Frye a certain confusion between mythoi as plot structures and mythoi as myths or archetypes which to my mind makes his work less valuable than it might be. 3. On historical narrative as a form of understanding, see the fine essay by Louis O. Mink, ‘‘Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument,’’ in The Writing of History: Literary reading for the plot [ 217 Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 129–49. Mink calls narrative ‘‘a primary and irreducible form of human comprehension’’ (p. 132). Of interest also is Dale H. Porter, The Emergence of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 4. See ‘‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’’ (Allerleirauh), in The Grimms’ German Folk Tales, trans. Francis P. Magoun and Alexander H. Krappe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), pp. 257–61. 5. See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller’’ (Der Erzähler), in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 91. On the place of incest and incest taboo in the Grimms’ tales, see Marthe Robert, ‘‘The Grimm Brothers,’’ in The Child’s Part, ed. Peter Brooks (reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), pp. 44–56. One might offer the following diagram of the movement of the plot in ‘‘All-Kinds-of-Fur,’’ from the initial overeroticization of the daughter (as the object of prohibited desires), through the underevaluation of the feminine (becoming the simulated beast), to the state of equi- librium achieved at the end: + + / – – / + –. Without attaching too much importance to such a formula, one can see that it describes a process of working-out or working- through common to many tales. 6. On the Oedipus myth, see Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘The Structural Study of Myth,’’ in Structural Anthropology (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1967), pp. 202–25. On the ‘‘atemporal matrix structure,’’ see Lévi-Strauss, ‘‘La Structure et la forme,’’ Cahiers de l’Institut de Science Economique Appliquée 99, sér. M, no. 7 (1960): 29. 7. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater, in Introduction to Aristotle, 2d ed., ed. Richard McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 678. 8. See Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979). Chatman’s book offers a useful summary, and attempt at synthesis, of narrative analysis in the structuralist tradition; he also gives extended bibliographical references. One can find an exposition of many of the issues that concern us here in Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). Fabula and sjužet are rendered as ‘‘story’’ and ‘‘plot’’ by Lee T. Lemon and Marion Reis in their anthology Russian Formalist Criticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). Equating the fabula/sjužet distinction with story/plot is much criticized by Meir Sternberg in Exposi- tional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), chap. 1. But Sternberg’s understanding of the concept of plot is based exclusively on E. M. Forster’s definition in Aspects of the Novel, where plot is distin- guished from story by its emphasis on causality. To offer causality as the key characteris- tic of plot may be to fall into the error of the post hoc ergo propter hoc, as Roland Barthes suggests in ‘‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’’ (Communications 8 , English trans. Stephen Heath, in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag [New York: Hill and Wang, 1982]), and as Vladimir Propp implicitly demonstrates in The Morphology of the Folktale, 2d ed., trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970); if plot appears to turn sequence into consequence, this may often be illusory; causality can be produced by new material, by changes in mood or atmosphere, by coincidence, by reinterpretation of the past, and so forth. Some of these issues will be taken up in chap. 10 [of Reading for the Plot]. Sternberg argues further that the sjužet is properly the whole of the text, whereas plot is an abstraction and reconstruction of it. But I think that sjužet 218 ] peter brooks as used by such Russian formalists as Boris Tomachevsky and Victor Shklovsky is simi- larly an abstraction and reconstruction of the logic of the narrative text and in this sense is quite close to Aristotle. For a useful discussion of the concept of plot, especially as related to the notion of mimesis, see Elizabeth Dipple, Plot (London: Methuen, 1970). 9. Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Narrative Time’’ in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 167. Compare Louis O. Mink on historical narrative, when he argues that the past ‘‘is not an untold story but can be made intel- ligible only as the subject of stories we tell’’ (‘‘Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument,’’ p. 148). Ricoeur offers a more extended presentation of his ideas in the recent Temps et récit (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983), which primarily concerns historical narrative and will be followed by a second volume devoted to fictional narrative. 10. The work I refer to here is available in English translation primarily in two anthologies: Lee T. Lemon and Marion Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism, which contains Tomachevsky’s essay in synthesis, ‘‘Thematics’’; and Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, Readings in Russian Poetics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). The major study of the Russian formalists remains Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism (The Hague: Mouton, 1955). See also the anthology in French translation edited by Tzvetan Todorov, Théorie de la littérature (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965). 11. Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, p. 21. 12. The paradigmatic axis is the ‘‘axis of selection’’ in Roman Jakobson’s terms, the set of rules and virtual terms that are activated along the syntagmatic axis, or ‘‘axis of combination.’’ For a good discussion of the uses of the two axes, see Jakobson, ‘‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,’’ in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cam- bridge: mit Press, 1960), pp. 350–77. 13. See A. J. Greimas, Sémantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966). One of Grei- mas’s more amusing illustrations is Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, which according to the model gives the following ‘‘actants’’: Subject: Man; Object: Classless Society; Sender: History; Receiver: Humanity; Helper: Proletariat; Opposer: Bourgeoisie. 14. See in particular Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du Décameron (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), and the essays of Poétique de la prose (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971), English trans. Richard Howard, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). On Todorov’s contribution to the poetics of narrative, see Peter Brooks, ‘‘Intro- duction’’ to Todorov, Poetics, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press, 1981). See also Gerald Prince, A Grammar of Stories (The Hague: Mouton, 1973). 15. See Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), English trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). 16. The notion of ‘‘literary competence,’’ implicit in Barthes’s view of reading, is very well discussed by Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 113–30. Culler’s book as a whole offers a lucid and useful discussion of structuralist approaches to the study of literature. 17. Barthes, ‘‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,’’ p. 27. 18. See Gérard Genette, ‘‘Discours du récit,’’ in Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), English trans. Jane Lewin, Narrative Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). To the histoire/récit (fabula/sjužet) distinction, Genette adds a third category, reading for the plot [ 219 which he calls narration—‘‘narrating’’—that is, the level at which narratives sometimes dramatize the means and agency (real or fictive) of their telling. This category will prove of use to us later on. On the ‘‘perversion’’ of time in Proust, see ‘‘Discours du récit,’’ p. 182. 19. Genette, ‘‘Discours du récit,’’ pp. 77–78. 20. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘‘Seconde Préface,’’ La Nouvelle Héloïse (Paris: Bi- bliothèque de la Pléïade, 1964), p. 18. 21. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 1954), 3:1045. 22. Genette, ‘‘Discours du récit,’’ p. 228. 23. Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 94. 24. See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), pp. 59–60; and Sartre, Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 171. 25. Jean Pouillon, Temps et roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). See also Claude Bre- mond, Logique du récit (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973). 26. On the resistance to the end, see D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). It is to Miller that I owe the term and concept ‘‘the narratable,’’ which will be used frequently. The relation of past and future to present is the subject of a famous meditation by Saint Augustine, in book 11 of the Confessions, where he finds a ‘‘solution’’ to the problem by the argument that there is a present of the past, in the form of memory, and a present of the future, in the form of anticipation or awaiting—a situation that he illustrates by the example of reciting a psalm. If Augustine does not solve the problem of temporality here, he surely offers a suggestive comment on the particular temporality of recitation or reading, its play of memory and anticipation. See the very rich analysis of Augustine’s meditation in Ricoeur, Temps et récit, pp. 19–53. 220 ] peter brooks