Analyzing Plot: Ch 2
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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Please do not quote for publication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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Table One
The Causal Modes of Narrative
Mode
Isolation
Community
Causal Type
contingent
Humean
Dynamic source
anxiety
fear and desire
Family Binds
The Great Dance
primal
teleological
libido
chi
Myth
mutually dependent
necessity
Example
Waiting for Godot
The Importance of
Being Earnest
Oedipus Tyrannus
Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight
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.
Myth moves with a sense of the absolute fitness of events, of their necessity, even
when the events make no rational sense. Every event in myth causes the world to be as it
is (that is, events are mutually dependent, and originate mutually), and come through
necessity—even the seeming accidents and mistakes. The world of Myth has no spare
parts, no casual statements, no wasted motions.
5. Three of the modes are characterized by the temporal relation between cause
and effect. Community is the mode of the present; Family Binds, of the past; and the
Great Dance, of the future.
In Community, where meaning comes from the effects of present desires and
fears, we have the maximum freedom of action. We can truly decide what to do and our
actions will make a difference. Therapies which are out to change lives by giving the
client the power to alter behavior will do best by building stories in the mode of
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Community. In that mode, we are free to change the present without interfering scripts
and purposes from the past and the future. Those events which are not mere accidents
have discoverable causes.
In Family Binds, the mode in which important causes lie in the distant past, a
primal family dynamic erupts into the present and generally destroys most in sight. We
have little power to change or even to suppress the emerging truths of our existence—we
have always been the murderous son, or the incestuous father, or something else we
would usually rather not be. Life has been pleasant only to the extent that we have been
ignorant of the truths coming out disastrously around us. As Freud says in The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, our free will has been an impression generated by our
ignorance.
The primal energy which drives Family Binds forms part of a general inheritance.
It arises from ancient stresses built into the human condition, particularly our condition as
members of families—mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters and brothers. This primal
energy is extrapersonal, at root. We do not create the role of parent or child on our own.
We do give it our own personal spin, based on our personality and circumstances.
Family Binds, as the name suggests, concerns ways in which we feel ourselves
constrained by ancient determinants of primal desire, hostility, and fear.
The Great Dance requires us to create a future which pulls us toward it. As
Teilhard de Chardin says of the radial energy he imagines pulling us toward the Omega
Point, nothing requires it to succeed. We may easily fail to do what the future prompts us
to do. Odysseus might have fallen to the suitors and Gawain to the seductive lady (that
is, more fully than he does).
6. Two of the modes are characterized by the general intensity of causal
relationships. In Isolation, the causal relationships fall apart. The two primary tools of
ironization are futility and discontinuity. The tramp of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
cannot manage to get his shoes tied; in Isolation even trivial deeds are difficult to
accomplish, and attempts are likely to be futile. Because actions come to nothing,
causality weakens.
When characters do not seem to be talking about the same thing, or when
statements, events, modes of speech, or characters appear from nowhere and lead the plot
in a novel direction, we have experienced discontinuity. Because causality depends on
associated events, discontinuity disrupts causal ties, and enough of it can threaten
causality in general.
If meaning drains away in Isolation, the opposite is true in Myth. Myth is always
out to provide a reality for its readers. Its events are always true, have always been true,
and will continue to be so. In this sense both Isolation and Myth are somewhat out of
time. If in Isolation, in a world without meaningful change, the present becomes
arbitrary and time collapses to a single indifferent moment, myth throws a shadow
outlining all the events of the world and so becomes a sort of perpetual present.
The relationship between Isolation and Myth is not exclusive. The myth of
Sisyphus, in which the main character must roll a stone up a hill only to have it escape
him and roll back down before he can get it to the top, names experience in the mode of
Isolation—it is a myth of isolation. It also makes some sense to read the story of Job as
an ironized narrative of Isolation, with the meanings of existence undone by futility and
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discontinuity, which moves into Myth. Job’s story becomes a primal charter for all
suffering.
Generally, Community plots are rooted in the present, Great Dance plots in the
future, and Family Binds in the past. In Isolation nothing makes any final difference at
all and in Myths everything makes all the difference. Both Isolation and Myth are
outside normal time. For Isolation, with the collapse of meaningful change, all time
resolves to an indifferent present. Myth finally contains all experience in one
simultaneous statement.
7. The modes are not perspectival but complementary. Obviously we all have
some experience of all the modes in our lives. It might seem, then, that the causal modes
are only perspectives on what is after all our single life.
But they are mutually contradictory. The story of Job as Myth is not just an
aspect of something which is, from another aspect, Job as a story of Isolation. The myth
is utterly meaningful, and the isolation narrative utterly meaningless.
In both modes his rewards at the end must be just as fundamentally undeserved as
his sufferings in the middle—but as Myth, that fact names a way in which the divine is
immanent in our lives. As Isolation, the story imagines the absolute absence of the
divine.
Aristotle said that tragic heroes suffer because of some hamartia, some mistake.
If Oedipus’s suffering is the result of some mistake of his, it cannot simultaneously be the
result of the emerging truth which has been the disastrous ground of his experience from,
and before, the beginning. Either he suffers from some mistake he makes or he suffers
because of something he never chose. These are two narrative universes—Community
and Family Binds—with their own universes of experience. Things happen differently in
those universes. The attraction of reading in the Community mode helps account for the
popularity of the tragic flaw which is responsible for the suffering of the tragic hero, a
concept missing in Aristotle but present in his current popular conception.
In Niels Bohr’s formulation of physical law, conditions which are contradictory
may be simultaneously true. Then they are complementary. An electron is both a
particle and a wave. It is not that it is something which we sometimes see as one
sometimes as another; it is both, simultaneously and contradictorily. Oedipus (and Lear,
and many another character caught in a Family Bind) is simultaneously responsible and
not responsible for his own suffering. It is not a matter of perspective but of
contradictory truths, contradictory but complementary modes of experience.
8. Plot processes are specific to the modes.
Because plots in the various modes are driven by different energies and are
constituted by events connected in contradictory ways, the plot processes are peculiar to
the modes. The general plot process described in the previous chapter derives from those
processes and describes what they have in common. For detailed examination of
particular plots the specific modal forms of plot are superior as outlined in Table Two.
Myth is missing from the table because it has no process of its own. Instead,
myth tells stories in all the other modes. What characterizes myth is not a process—in
fact, none of the modes are defined by their process. Instead, all the modes arise from
our habits of construing meaning. To put it a little more hopefully, the modes name the
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basic ways the universe hangs together for us (or, less hopefully, refuses to hang together
at all). They are finally extraliterary, as all literature is at heart. All our narratives name
our experience of the world. Else, why would they interest us?
To explain Table Two well will be the task of the remainder of the book. I will
go through plots with primary processes in all of the modes, and I will explain the nature
of the stages. (I must qualify process with primary because few plots name experience in
one mode alone.)
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Table Two
Summary of Modal Plot Processes
General Process Stages
1.
Initiation.
Energy is
loosed.
2.
Burnt
fingers.
Energy felt
in a random,
confused
way.
3.
Temporary
binding.
Energy
subject to
unstable
binding.
4.
Infernal
vision.
Energy fully
disruptive.
5.
Final
binding.
Energy
bound.
6.
Termination.
A stable
world
beyond the
work may be
suggested.
Modal Process Stages
Mode
The Great
Dance
Family
Binds
1.
The call
2.
The ordeal
3.
In retreat
The
violated
ceremony
Community The other
side of the
fence
The
fragmenting
family
Social
blunders
The
climax
Isolation
The falling
rain
A break
in the
clouds
The
opening
door
Simple
solutions
4.
From the
depths
The
straitened
course
Isolation
(Return to
2.)
Order →
6
5
3
1
2
Reader’s time →
4
4
5.
Identity
6.
Return
The way
it is
The
reflective
survivors
Picking
up the
fallen
standard
The firm
society
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9. We may have complementary experiences of a single text. Our ordinary
experience is extraordinarily complex. Hardly an event does not take its place in several
registers of association. Once the event has taken its place in our memory, it lives in
many ways.
We meet someone familiar. In Isolation, it is a chance meeting, wholly
meaningless; we do not make real contact anyway, but may play language games of
greeting.
In Community we have some relationship to this person which has a past and a
future. Our life is meaningful because of such associations, even if hostile or indifferent.
A Family Binds experience of the meeting will probably involve projection of
some sort: if the person we have met is not a member of our family, we will succeed in
treating them as if they were. If the person does happen to be a member of our family,
we will treat them not as they are but as their primal family relation to us dictates. And
indeed we do succeed in treating people through these projections, as any psychoanalyst
can tell you.
In the Great Dance the meeting is not random but part of a pattern of meaningful
coincidences. We may wonder what the meeting means for us and not even suspect we
may be a bit crazy (as we might from the point of view of the other modes). We are
picking our way through the events of our life, including this meeting, toward a future
which will show us what we are at bottom.
A Mythic meeting has been set from the beginning of time and is in a way outside
time. We will always be meeting this person and always have been.
The overexamined life is not worth living, as the Jungian analyst James Hillman
has said. Most meetings will probably not elicit even one of my set of meanings, at least
in our conscious reflection. But each meeting may be part of all those stories.
An event in a narrative may resonate in different plots. In fact, few narratives
have simple plots in a single mode with no shadow plots whatsoever. As our experience
is complementary, so are the stories we tell about it.
Supplementary Note
-Chapter Two, The Modes of Narrative Experience. The modes I have developed
from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum,1957,
reprint 1969), where what I have called Isolation, Community, Family Binds, the Great
Dance, and Myth are named Irony, Low Mimesis, High Mimesis, Romance, and Myth. I
have renamed them because I found Frye’s names confusing to students in various ways.
I have also redefined them in causal terms. Frye defined them in terms of the relative
power of the characters and in terms of their emotional tenor. I did get a chance to send
him an early article in which I redefined the modes and he wrote back that it was what he
had hoped someone would do with his work. I mention this because I wish to say that I
am careful of Frye’s ideas and grateful for them. When he gave his address as President
of the Modern Language Association I came early and sat in the front row.