Return of the plot

Return of the plot
Julian Evans


Publication date: December 6, 2004

It would be strange to recommend Francis Scott Fitzgerald as an ultra-modern master of plotting, but let's take a closer look at how Anson Hunter, the main character of the story "The Young Rich Man", is presented to the reader; the description of the character is preceded by the narrator’s reflections on the technique of his own writing: “Start with an individual personality, and, really, you yourself won’t notice how you create a typical image; start with outlining a typical image, and, really, you won’t create anything - absolutely nothing” .

"Rich Young Man" was written in 1925, while Fitzgerald was languishing in anticipation of the publication of "The Great Gatsby." The triumph of modernism, which spread in the 1920s with the speed of a blast wave, was marked by a radical break - a watershed in the technique of plotting. Behind were Austen, Dickens and James, ahead were Joyce and Borges. Not only is Fitzgerald not stuck in the nineteenth century (as most critics believe); The thirty-page "Rich Young Man" demonstrates the remarkable ease with which this writer crossed the aforementioned divide. The plot is not reduced to a linear narrative; it is complicated by the modern - that is, quite sophisticated - author's self-awareness. Perhaps Fitzgerald owes more to Chekhov than to Beckett, but his narrative is rather post-Beckettian: it bears the imprint of a reality that has escaped the author’s control and has become ambiguous, uncontrollable, esoteric. The writer concludes the exposition of the story as follows: “The only way for me to describe young Anson Hunter is to treat him as if he were a foreigner and firmly stand my ground. If I accept his point of view for even a moment, my cause is lost.”

Why should this bother us? Because in an era of cultural abundance and diversity - such as ours - there must be many stories, they must compete with each other for survival, as in the time of Fitzgerald. In a sense, this is what happens. Stories accompany us everywhere. Newspaper headlines are potential subjects, as well as the multiple narratives characteristic of the postmodern pluralism invading our lives. People have never had as much leisure as we have; and we spend it telling and listening to stories. But it’s not so much about the stories themselves, but about the specific ways of disseminating and “delivering” them. We live in a world where it's not just about publishing a work of fiction; This is followed by presentations, market manipulation, drawing up shortlists of works nominated for certain awards, reviewing, and criticism. Since no one has time to read the thousands of novels that are published in Britain every year, the high level of development of the above epiphenomena gives us the feeling that artistic culture is not only alive, but also doing well. Is it really? My answer is a sharp and emphatic “no.”

The history of the novel was for the time being - namely, until the early 1920s - at the same time the history of plot composition; After the modernist watershed, the paths of the novel and the plot diverged: the traditional novel, based on the description of the socially determined interaction of characters, gradually lost ground, and in the 1970s, when the author's self-awareness entered into an alliance with self-irony, things reached a new crisis. Precisely a crisis. It may be objected to me that as a result of the unprecedented fragmentation of social existence, the novel should no longer satisfy the fundamental requirement-postulate of E.-M. Forster: “Yes, my dears, nothing can be done: the novel tells a story”; they will say that Joyce's linguistic heaps have turned us away from our former simplicity and naivety; that the reader has become too sophisticated to continue to accept at face value the “facts” that the omniscient authoritarian narrator tries to instill in him: he no longer believes that “it snowed on Sunday afternoon” and Charles and Emma Bovary went with Homais and Leon look at the new weaving factory near Yonville.

The first of these objections is based on the premise that the novel is an extremely fragile and vulnerable form that is easily destabilized and destroyed. This assumption seems completely arbitrary: it does not follow from the four-hundred-year history of the novel, which has demonstrated the highest adaptability and vitality of this genre. As for the last objection, which boils down to the fact that now it is not as easy as before to bully the reader, this is simply a slander against our grandparents. Another harmful but extremely common prejudice in our time is that there is some fundamental difference between a novelist and a storyteller. It is based on the assumption (not proven by anyone, by the way) that the novelist is the creator of form and language, while the narrator is a participant in a more “base” narrative act. This assumption can be refuted in many ways, depending on literary tastes and preferences, but here it is appropriate to quote such an ardent defender of the modern novel as Fiammetta Rocco, who is on the jury for this year’s Man Booker Prize: “After reading 132 books in 147 days ", you begin to understand why almost all of these novels - even well-written and skillfully composed, of which there were many of those submitted to the competition - are so blatantly meaningless."

I have no desire to identify with the second imaginary reader in Edward Morgan Forster's Aspects of the Novel ("What does a novel do? Of course it tells a story, and if it doesn't, I don't need it for nothing"). Like Forster, I despise this “typical Englishman” to the core. But where is today the “high narrative” in the spirit of Fitzgerald and Robert Louis Stevenson, who, in addition to his world-famous novels for young people, wrote The Beach of Falesa, one of the best modern stories in the English language? In Stevenson's time there was no distinction between literature and storytelling; Henry James, a subtle critic and literary snob, would not have been his friend and enthusiastic admirer, if such had existed.

The golden age of story telling is certainly not the nineteenth century. There is no golden age for plotting at all. It has fascinated man since the earliest creation myths and continues to do so in the form of modern cosmology: what is the Big Bang theory if not a fascinating story? Christopher Booker begins his encyclopedic and well-pedantic book “Seven Basic Plots” with the position that narrative archetypes, which arose thanks to stable combinations of mental images of inner vision, play a colossal role in our mental life. Booker writes that Beowulf and The Tale of Gilgamesh are based, by and large, on the same archetype - the archetype of the defeated monster; the same can be said of Steven Spielberg's Jaws and Ian Fleming's Dr. No.

Booker could go even further in this direction: such narrative archetypes, sucked in, as they say, with mother’s milk, have psychological priority over conscious thinking; this explains the fact that they invade our dreams. The chapters "Conquering the Monster", "From Rags to Riches" and "Journey and Return" show what lies at the heart of their respective fictional narratives. This is nothing new (it has long been known that many stories are transformed myths), but we should be grateful to the author for explaining why many stories evoke the same feeling in us and why they have a similar emotional impact on us in certain twists and turns of plot development. It's nice to have proof that we have a lot in common: as human beings, we all share the need to be told stories. However, some reservations about Booker's approach may be in order here; The author spends a lot of time and effort proving that Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary easily fit into the system of archetypes he proposes, but his research says almost nothing about what value these works have for us. Only around the six hundredth page of the book is the word “catharsis” used for the first time, but I am convinced that this concept has immeasurably greater significance for us, readers, than all the matrices of prototexts combined. The purification [catharsis] of the soul from the painful emotions that accumulate in us as we go through life’s path (no matter how smooth and ordinary it may seem at first glance) is the deepest goal of every “story.”

But is this priority respected today? In cinema, which has retained youthful spontaneity, narrative storytelling can be seen in the work of almost all major directors, despite the difference in basic values, for example, Spielberg, on the one hand, and Abbas Kiarostami, on the other. In the novel, however, the story is lost among the modernist flourishes (despite Borges's remark that for him reading Stevenson is "a form of happiness"). And it is not modernism as such that is to blame for this. The problem is that its basic doctrine is the psychological and linguistic purism professed by Virginia Woolf, T. St. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Wallace Stevens - very quickly degenerated into a catastrophically hypertrophied author's self-awareness. After the 1950s, the belief spread among writers that being a follower of Beckett and Borges was more respectable than following in the footsteps of Orwell and Evelyn Waugh. Maybe the novelists were tired of the boring linear narrative, or maybe they just wanted to “be modern.” Yet I can think of no more compelling embodiment of alienation (that plague of the 20th century) than Orwell's George Bowling in Coming Up for Air, and I can't think of a novel that better captures the decline of England. than Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy; in Russian translation - "Officers and Gentlemen"].

As a result of the "new self-awareness" of writers in the 1960s, new rules of the game were established: from that time on, novelists considered it their duty to let the reader know - through formalistic games and pervasive irony - that they were well aware that what they wrote was not more than fiction. One might think that Flaubert, who in March 1852 spent two long days in his office “in melancholy, idleness and almost unconsciousness,” not knowing how to continue the story of Emma Bovary, did not understand that he was dealing with fiction! Playing with plot is not telling a story (as Fitzgerald understood very well). The obsession of writers with their one and only “I” leads to a special, meta-artistic way of self-expression, running as a leitmotif through the entire gamut of advanced literary exercises: from the satirical burlesques of Amis to the magical realism of Rushdie, from the Scottish feverish exoticism of Kelman to the anti-bourgeois-surreal shocking Self and the “chemical "Welsh's Adventures; in the end, only “shifted” memoirs and confessional novelism are left to our lot - the last avatars of metafiction. This uninhabitable climate was deliberately fostered by publishers and critics who hunted for the white whale of the stylistically perfect novel in the 1980s, and for the wayward representatives of the “chemical generation” in the 1990s; As for the form of “normal” linear narration, the trendsetters of literary fashion showed open hostility towards it. Authors who dared to make a white middle-class hero the hero of the story were also not welcomed. Many truly talented writers have suffered from these unspoken bans: just remember Michael Bracewell, who managed to brilliantly recreate the characteristic features of 1980s England in the unnoticed novel The Conclave, and James Buchan ], who painted a powerful picture of the decline of the middle class in the novel Slide, which was unanimously ignored by critics.

If English-language fiction isn't about to commit suicide (in other words: if it hopes to retain readership), writers would do well to decide what kind of stories we need right now. Of course, we are not talking about any prescriptions: after all, we do not want to reduce fiction to what the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic called “market literature, moderately realistic, optimistic, cheerful, sexual, openly or covertly didactic,” - that is, to a kind of “caprealism”, the bourgeois ideological equivalent of socialist realism. There can be no obligatory plots, big or small; there are no insignificant events - there are only insignificant writers. A novelist may want to write about freedom (literature has been immensely enriched in the last century by outstanding works that reflect the experience of oppression, be it the trials of immigrants, victims of genocide, or the gulag), but an unhappy marriage of “local natives” can also turn out to be something of a “prison experience." A novelist has the right to take on a topic as broad or narrow as he likes, but he would do well to keep in mind that the novel remains a social form and that any literary prose conveys to the reader the message that whatever a person’s self-identification, personality consists not only from yourself, but also from others.

The novel, taken to its full potential, exists to reflect - and ultimately strengthen - the connections that exist between us, to trace how they arise and break. This can only be done in one way - by telling a story. According to Margaret Atwood, the writer's job is to make all these stories compelling. And those who rush to find refuge in introspection and irony reveal their heartlessness and fear of getting into “other people’s” problems. Fiction, like life, is not an idle stroll. Flaubert continues in the letter already quoted above: “When I think of how much beauty was entrusted to me - and only to me - I feel such horror that goosebumps run down my spine and I want to run away and hide.”

The novel's neurotic involvement of the last thirty years with introspection and exhibitionism may be coming to an end. It is difficult to judge such things with complete confidence, but today there are quite clear signs of a revival of interest in the sociological aspect of the novel; they can easily be found in the work of authors as diverse as Jonathan Franzen and Michel Houellebecq. These writers found a way to recreate a reliable picture of the world without falling into either “denigration” or sentimentality. The inner world and motivations of the characters in their novels - quite in the Balzac spirit - throw light on the conditions of our social and cultural existence; the spiritual priorities of the characters in their books are our priorities: we recognize ourselves in their imperfect attempts to tell a story about themselves designed to save their lives. Often such attempts are doomed to failure. This is evidenced, for example, by the story of Anson Hunter, a character deformed by the inability to be happy without some woman protecting him from the world, thereby allowing him to indulge himself in the illusion of superiority over others. Fitzgerald's young rich man can serve as a meaningful metaphor for our novelists - individuals who have completely lost touch with reality. Nevertheless, as long as there are readers who are willing to spend not the worst hours of their lives feeding the vanity of these authors, they will drag out their rather miserable existence. But I have a suspicion that readers deserve more: after all, love should be mutual.

Translation by Joseph Friedman

Original article