WRITERS WHISTLING PAST THE CEMETERY...
Are plots for graveyards?
I heard a brilliant writer deliver this quip a while back. And, not without significance, the writer was a literary author, an exceptionally good one.
Plot-centric fiction tends to be popular fiction. Arguably, this has been the dominant form of storytelling throughout human history and wasn't really challenged until the nineteenth century.
When advances in printing collided with crass commercialism, this type of story, which has never lost its appeal to the masses, became associated with pandering to low brow tastes.
Hence the reactionary response of the highbrow author to put plot six feet under. For only then, it was felt, could fiction be resurrected as a glorified medium, as fit for artistic expression as music, painting, or poetry.
But if plots are for graveyards, they can still come back to haunt even the most elite of authors.
There was never a writer more serious about serious fiction than George Eliot. So, for ninety-five percent of the book there is this emphasis on character psychology. Eliot thus achieved a realism in her fictional people lacking in the melodramatic characters of her contemporaries.
Anyway, that’s the first ninety-five percent of the story. When she needs to end the thing– if that story is Middlemarch, or The Mill On the Floss, or The Lifted Veil – the juice is suddenly far from “pulp free.” In fact, it’s loaded with plot right out of Days of Our Lives or even Weird Tales!
In Middlemarch, a character comes in at the last minute who seems to have wandered out of a completely different Victorian novel. He is all but twitching his waxed mustachios as he threatens to reveal that venerable soap opera trope– YOUR HIDDEN SECRET THAT NOBODY KNOWS BUT I DO! M-MWHA-WA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
Time to wrap up The Mill on the Floss? Cue the DeMille style natural disaster for a spectacular conclusion of mass destruction, human misery and death. Always a sure crowd pleaser.
And to end The Lifted Veil, her tale of telepathy and precognition, Eliot brings back a character from early on, who has begun a pursuit of Mad Science since last seen.
He asks his old college pal if he might give reanimating the corpse of a servant a go because, you know, what are you going to do with it?
And, dang, if the old boy, and George Eliot, doesn’t pull it off! The dead rises just long enough to impart a revelation that ushers in the story to its conclusion with two pages to go!
No joke: this guy even matriculated at a university in Geneva – just like Victor Frankenstein!
Even the twentieth century modernists in their attempts to break with all modes of storytelling previously known to mankind couldn’t quite shaft plot.
They moved it from the center, applied it more subtly, were wonderfully innovative, but they couldn’t quite abandon it, either.
So, for instance, James Joyce’s incredible The Dead is structured on a party: the story moves from person to person. Loosely plotted to be sure, but there it is.
And we can be certain Joyce knew the value of a good plot because he swiped one of the most enduring for Ulysses.
As William Patrick Day has shown in his study In the Circles of Fear and Desire, the elitist twentieth century Modernists were often pilfering nineteenth century popular trash literature (a.k.a. "the Gothic") thematically and symbolically, left and right.
So, when Hemingway explored the troublesome inversion for an impotent male of masculine and feminine roles (The Sun Also Rises), he’d been scooped thirty years earlier by Bram Stoker in Dracula. ("Jake Barnes, I feel ya!" " -- from the Journal of Jonathan Harker).
"Sir, would like your double served like Joseph Conrad is having his in 1909’s The Secret Sharer or Stevenson’s vintage 1886 concoction of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?"
In other words, the same elements that make a good story tend to make a good story, and that includes a good plot.
Thus, plots will never be for graveyards as long as someone is left alive who enjoys reading.
I heard a brilliant writer deliver this quip a while back. And, not without significance, the writer was a literary author, an exceptionally good one.
Plot-centric fiction tends to be popular fiction. Arguably, this has been the dominant form of storytelling throughout human history and wasn't really challenged until the nineteenth century.
When advances in printing collided with crass commercialism, this type of story, which has never lost its appeal to the masses, became associated with pandering to low brow tastes.
Hence the reactionary response of the highbrow author to put plot six feet under. For only then, it was felt, could fiction be resurrected as a glorified medium, as fit for artistic expression as music, painting, or poetry.
But if plots are for graveyards, they can still come back to haunt even the most elite of authors.
There was never a writer more serious about serious fiction than George Eliot. So, for ninety-five percent of the book there is this emphasis on character psychology. Eliot thus achieved a realism in her fictional people lacking in the melodramatic characters of her contemporaries.
Anyway, that’s the first ninety-five percent of the story. When she needs to end the thing– if that story is Middlemarch, or The Mill On the Floss, or The Lifted Veil – the juice is suddenly far from “pulp free.” In fact, it’s loaded with plot right out of Days of Our Lives or even Weird Tales!
In Middlemarch, a character comes in at the last minute who seems to have wandered out of a completely different Victorian novel. He is all but twitching his waxed mustachios as he threatens to reveal that venerable soap opera trope– YOUR HIDDEN SECRET THAT NOBODY KNOWS BUT I DO! M-MWHA-WA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
Time to wrap up The Mill on the Floss? Cue the DeMille style natural disaster for a spectacular conclusion of mass destruction, human misery and death. Always a sure crowd pleaser.
And to end The Lifted Veil, her tale of telepathy and precognition, Eliot brings back a character from early on, who has begun a pursuit of Mad Science since last seen.
He asks his old college pal if he might give reanimating the corpse of a servant a go because, you know, what are you going to do with it?
And, dang, if the old boy, and George Eliot, doesn’t pull it off! The dead rises just long enough to impart a revelation that ushers in the story to its conclusion with two pages to go!
No joke: this guy even matriculated at a university in Geneva – just like Victor Frankenstein!
Even the twentieth century modernists in their attempts to break with all modes of storytelling previously known to mankind couldn’t quite shaft plot.
They moved it from the center, applied it more subtly, were wonderfully innovative, but they couldn’t quite abandon it, either.
So, for instance, James Joyce’s incredible The Dead is structured on a party: the story moves from person to person. Loosely plotted to be sure, but there it is.
And we can be certain Joyce knew the value of a good plot because he swiped one of the most enduring for Ulysses.
As William Patrick Day has shown in his study In the Circles of Fear and Desire, the elitist twentieth century Modernists were often pilfering nineteenth century popular trash literature (a.k.a. "the Gothic") thematically and symbolically, left and right.
So, when Hemingway explored the troublesome inversion for an impotent male of masculine and feminine roles (The Sun Also Rises), he’d been scooped thirty years earlier by Bram Stoker in Dracula. ("Jake Barnes, I feel ya!" " -- from the Journal of Jonathan Harker).
"Sir, would like your double served like Joseph Conrad is having his in 1909’s The Secret Sharer or Stevenson’s vintage 1886 concoction of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?"
In other words, the same elements that make a good story tend to make a good story, and that includes a good plot.
Thus, plots will never be for graveyards as long as someone is left alive who enjoys reading.
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