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Analyzing Plot: Ch 2 10

DRAFT

December 8, 2005

Please do not quote for publication

Analyzing Plot

Chapter Two

The Modes of Narrative Experience

General plot process is a blunt tool. It is not as blunt as Freytag’s pyramid, but because it does not take into account the kinds of narratives, it will fail to bring out much detail of the plot process. Some plots, namely those of myth and isolation as explained below, will escape analysis altogether unless we take narrative mode into account.

Discerning plot process in a complex work is usually an effort of discovery and reflection for me, and really possible only after I have not only finished but thought over the text. The shape becomes clear only in retrospect. I must say too that my conceptions of the plots of works I have lived with for many years, such as Beowulf and Midsummer Night’s Dream, change, and I have the impression that my conceptions improve.

I have found that it helps to look first for the temporary binding. Once I have understood that, the rest of the plot generally becomes clear.

General plot process can occasionally be easy to apply, especially to simple plots such as those of many situation comedies and formulaic movies. It is gratifying to realize, and to explain to whoever is around, that a temporary binding has passed and an infernal vision is in prospect. It is often possible to guess from the nature of the temporary binding what the infernal vision is likely to be—once we know the real difficulties with which the plot is concerned we might guess the form that the greatest disruption of the narrative world will take. We may also be able to guess what the final binding will be.

On the level of general plot process our analyses are doomed to superficiality, though. Plot is all about meaning. When we recognize the kinds of ways events can come to be meaningful in a narrative, we can compare works to those most like them. We are able to see into the heart of the work. The narrative modes describe the roots of narrative meaning.

Guiding Assertions for Analysis of Modes

1. Cause and effect is the way for meaning to arise in narrative.

2. David Hume’s analysis of cause and effect lies behind most modern thought on the topic.

3. Narratives can feature kinds of cause and effect which violate the Humean constraints.

4. The five modes are ways in which meaning arises or fails to arise.

5. Three of the modes are characterized by the temporal relation between cause and effect.

6. Two of the modes are characterized by the general intensity of causal relationships.

7. The modes are not perspectival but complementary.

8. Plot processes are specific to the modes.

9. We may have complementary experiences of a single text.

To Explain the Assertions

1. Cause and effect is the way for meaning to arise in narrative. Other ways for meaning to arise are through meaningful juxtaposition and through imagery. Narrative theorists speak of two kinds of events in a narrative: constituent and supplementary events. Constituent events are those which are part of the causal relationships of the plot. Supplementary events (say, the chorus in Oedipus Tyrannus commenting with dread on the unfolding plot) cause nothing but are certainly part of the meaning—a supplementary part. In this case, the chorus provides a discursive commentary. Meanings which escape plot may be part of the second dimension of meaning in literature, which the lyric dimension.

Lyric poetry does not necessarily tell a story but necessarily fills in a single time with figures—often with many figures, juxtaposed. When poetry does tell a story, it borrows from or, if the story is the primary way meaning is built in the poem, becomes a narrative. When a narrative builds its meaning through metaphorical association, it borrows from lyric, and, if that dimension of meaning becomes primary, may be said to have become primarily a lyric (even if it is in prose).

Narrative and lyric are distinguished by their relationship to time. Plot works from moment to moment, moving us through the work with some variant on the basic narrative question, “My word—what next?” Lyric aspires to simultaneity. The lyric dimension of meaning puts images side by side with one another, or circles around the subject with one observation, one piece of information, one scene after another until we get the full picture. Cause and effect is the heart of plot, but in lyric there are finally no two moments in which the cause and effect relationship can be defined.

2. David Hume’s analysis of cause and effect lies behind most modern thought on the topic. Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (first edition, 1748) began the modern conversation on causality.

Cause and effect, that is, events with the relationship Hume imagines, must be contiguous in time and space. If I push a glass and it falls over, my push must come immediately adjacent to the fall in both location and time if the push is to have the character of a cause.

The push must come before the glass falls if it is a cause. The cause is prior to the effect.

The cause must be adequate to the effect. If I find that I must push with a certain strength or the glass will not fall, then a push alone will not do as a cause. I must specify a push of a certain minimal strength.

What if I push with formerly adequate strength but the glass does not fall? Then I have not identified the cause, for Hume observes that the effect must necessarily follow the cause. Hume goes on to say that necessity is a product of the human mind, not of events; all we can ever observe objectively is that a cause is more and more likely to produce an effect as we see more and more instances of their association. Kant read this and, as he said, “I awoke from my dogmatic slumbers.” In fact, necessity is not the only way the mind may be involved in construing causal relationships.

3. Narratives can feature kinds of cause and effect which violate the Humean constraints. It makes no Humean sense for the infertility of Thebes to be caused by a long-past murder. The relationship violates the contiguity of cause and effect in time and space. What is more, the relationship between the murder and the plague seems neither adequate nor necessary. The relationship between the murder and the effect seems more metaphorical than anything—Oedipus has murdered the possibility of generation by murdering his father. To understand the play well we must still accept that the murder has caused the plague. We cannot question the oracle’s judgment that the plague will not be lifted until the murderer is found. What is more, we do naturally accept that the murder has caused the plague, and that the way to lift the plague is to discover the murderer. Our minds are ready to accept causal arrangements which escape Hume’s formulation.

The cause of a narrative event may even be found in the future. How else can we understand Gawain’s discovery of Bercilak’s castle? Gawain is wandering blindly in the north woods; he finds the castle in order that he may be tested there while he believes he is taking his ease. The cause of his finding the castle comes from his future. That violates the Humean constraint on the temporal priority of the cause. But we must—and easily do—accept the meaningfulness of Gawain’s discovery of the castle if we are to be adequate readers of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Meaningful coincidence is common in the world of Gawain but not of David Hume (nor of normative modern science).

4. The five modes are ways in which meaning arises or fails to arise. The causal modes are Community, Family Binds, the Great Dance, Myth, and Isolation.

Community works by Humean causality. Community is the common sense mode—the plot is driven by ordinary desire and fear, operating in the present without serious violation of the Humean constraints. Charles Dickens’s novels and most sitcoms are examples of Community.

In saying that Community plots are driven by desire and fear, I mean that these familiar emotions are the primary causes of meaningful change, and usually the source of the disruption which the plot is due to bind or heal. Terms such as “driven by” and “bind” are part of a dynamic metaphor which I find useful in dealing with plot (and have borrowed from Peter Brooks). In this understanding, the narrative world may be imagined as a system in which some energy has been loosed which it will be the work of the plot to bind. The causal mode determines what kind of energy will drive the plot, and the process by which it will be bound.

In Family Binds some primal cause from the distant past disrupts life in the present. Oedipus Tyrannus is an example of such a plot process. Fate and destiny are words which have been used to name energy which drives the plot in Family Binds, but they unfortunately are also used for the Great Dance process, and thus have to be held down to one or the other by main force if they are to do any work. I propose libido as the force which drives the Family Binds plot—a set of primal energies which we possess as part of our heritage, there within us from before our beginning, and which can emerge to command our attention and our actions.

Great Dance plots work by a teleological process. Teleology concerns the telos, the end or goal. Meaning flows into the present from the future, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or The Odyssey. Chi is as widespread a term as any for the energy which drives the Great Dance, though it has been called prana, The Force, numen, kundalini, and, in Beowulf, wyrd. Kurt Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan calls it The Universal Will To Become and puts it in a bottle. There may well be different kinds of chi; the kind I need to represent here is teleological energy, the chi which flows into and through us from the future.

In Myth every action has universal resonance. The relationship of necessity between cause and effect becomes distributed through the events of Myth. All events are necessary to each.

We do not write true myth anymore; it is as much a stage of consciousness as anything, and we must reconstruct ourselves as proper readers of myth if we are to understand it at all well. When we do that we live inside a story. The story determines our reality; our world becomes a shadow of the narrative world of the myth. We do not know a traditional society which does not have a body of myth which constructs the world for them. Just as all mammals (except the primal echidnae) dream, so all ancient societies spin out myths. There may have been the social counterparts of the spiny anteaters somewhere, the echidnae of societies which do not tell myths, but we have not discovered them. For a few years in the 1980s some thought we had with the Tasaday of the Philippines, but they turned out to be a fraud. Their mythlessness should have told us as much.

Myth aspires to the condition of lyric. One myth of a culture tends to hook to another until the entire system of myths presents a full picture of a world to live in. Individual myths have the process of plot, but when they are taken all together, they are a complete and static image of an experiential reality.

In the causal mode of Isolation meaning refuses to arise at all. Events fall apart and meaningful change becomes impossible. Events are related not by cause and effect but by mere contingency. Things just happen to happen. If you have ever read hardcore postmodern theory you know how the world looks in the mode of Isolation. Every other, as Derrida says, is wholly other—in the mode of isolation. Irony, a distance between what is said and what is meant, is the fundamental figure of Isolation.

Irony aspires to nonbeing. Cause and effect break down, leaving only sheer accident. In the end, in the ironic mode, nothing has ever happened at all.

Table One

The Causal Modes of Narrative

Mode / Causal Type / Dynamic source / Example
Isolation / contingent / anxiety / Waiting for Godot
Community / Humean / fear and desire / The Importance of Being Earnest
Family Binds / primal / libido / Oedipus Tyrannus
The Great Dance / teleological / chi / Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Myth / mutually dependent / necessity / Myth of Pelops

By dynamic source I mean the general nature of the plot energy in the mode. Anxiety is fear or desire without an object. In the mode of Isolation, we can never discover what we truly want or truly fear. Desires may not be satisfied, nor fears stilled, since we can never discover their true and final object. Such final objects are always deferred in Isolation; meanings are never quite achieved. Therefore a thoroughly ironized plot can never come to an infernal vision, because at that point the real source of the disruption which the plot will bind emerges fully. Because the real source never emerges it cannot be dealt with—such plots can never come to a final binding, and must seek other modes of closure than that of plot process.

The libido of Family Binds is meant to recall the primal sources of desire and aggression which Freud evoked. The sources of change in family binds are often things we did not know we wanted, people we were not aware of loving or of hating. When the libido emerges it is destructive to our ordinary relationships. Libido is a part of our primal inheritance. In a way it is not even personal. We discover that we are playing roles which demand actions from us that we never wanted to take. Parents and children often find themselves playing out roles which surprise them. Life can spring scripts on us, and they can seem to be heritages from the past.

The meaningful coincidences of the Great Dance lead us into an unfolding future, as if the world had it in for us to become something, or to discover our true nature. Chi, when it works as the driving force of a Great Dance, drives us toward ourselves.