Weekly Readings #150 (12/16/24-12/22/24)

there is no plot

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

My series of literature courses for paid subscribers, The Invisible College, took a holiday break this week, but next week I will release the final episode of 2024. It will focus on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. On New Year’s Day I will drop the 2025 schedule; on January 17, after a winter break to allow us to catch up on our reading, The Invisible College will resume for another year of somewhere between 45 and 50 episodes. I want to thank old, new, and future paid subscribers; a subscription might even make good a Christmas gift for the literature student in your life. And I would like to thank as well Henry Begler¹ for his generous tribute to The Invisible College in his end-of-the-year post:

And what a kick these lectures are: supreme entertainment, a dance of ideas, capacious, gossipy, and relistenable. Somehow they manage to synthesize trends and thoughts of the past and make their continued relevance obvious in a way that transcends clumsy “Shakespeare was the first rapper”-isms. When politics intrudes, it comes as daring and often challenging readings of works that are far from obvious or partisan, and throughout the lectures there is a pure pleasure in the act of speaking about (and reading aloud) novels and poetry.

Henry also refers to me as “the Ezra Pound of this little corner of Online,” which I will take as both praise and caution (no Italian politics for me, I promise!). Mary Jane Eyre evokes The Velvet Underground, a compliment I will also “study deserving” as I prepare all tomorrow’s podcasts.²

Meanwhile, people on here are wondering: can Substack sell a novel to readers? Naomi Kanakia has concluded that it cannot on the basis of her experience with her debut literary novel, The Default World, released earlier this year (please see my review); Ross Barkan is hoping it can with his forthcoming Glass Century. I will enter myself into evidence when the time comes, since I am so utterly relentless about promoting my own forthcoming novel, Major Arcana, in this free weekly newsletter. (If it’s free, you have to expect advertising.) Ross called my saga of art, love, and magic “perhaps the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century” and Naomi called it “readable” (higher praise than it sounds when you consider what she thinks of much contemporary fiction).³ Give the gift of pre-ordering Major Arcana to yourself this Christmas—pre-orders are the coin of the realm in publishing; as Ross says in the post linked above, “They determine how many books bookstores order and what kind of coverage you get. They are everything for authors”—and rest on these dark winter days in the assurance that it will arrive alongside the spring with lilies and swallows on April 22, 2025, just one day before Shakespeare’s birthday and (if you need more images of birth, rebirth, or resurrection) just two days after Easter.

For today, some requested commentary on the art of plot in fiction, plus movie reviews, pod recommendations, and more in the footnotes. Have a good Christmas if you celebrate, and please enjoy!

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Plot Twist: Narrative Structure and the Meaning of Fiction

“William Faulkner Outlines on His Office Wall the Plot of His Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel, A Fable (1954)”

Referencing a crude boast made in last week’s entry, an anon wrote in to my super-secret Tumblr with this question:

In your recent Substack, you mentioned being able to plot circles around [Martin] Amis. Which of your novels, and which novels in general, do you consider the best-plotted?

Since I am invited to discuss the question seriously rather than boastfully, I must seriously reiterate a point Samuel R. Delany makes in the essay “Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student” (which can found in two of his collections, Shorter Views and About Writing):

The first move the more experienced creative writer can make toward absorbing these models [of good writing] is to realize that “plot” is an illusion. It’s an illusion the writer ought to disabuse her- or himself of pretty quickly, too, at least if she or he ever wants to write anything of substance, ambition, or literary richness. (There is no plot.) That is to say, plot is an effect that other written elements produce in concert. Outside those elements, plot has no autonomous existence.

What there is, is narrative structure.

Here is a formal statement of the reason plot doesn’t exist: No narrative unit necessarily corresponds to any textual unit. Plots are always and only composed of synoptic units.

Delany roughly evokes two canonical distinctions in literary theory: E. M. Forster’s in Aspects of the Novel between “story” and “plot” and the Russian Formalists’ between fabula and syuzhet. Delany’s “plot,” Forster’s “story,” and the Formalists’ “fabula” all refer to the synopsizable chronological sequence of a fictional narrative’s events. Delany’s “narrative structure,” Forster’s “plot,” and the Formalists’ “syuzhet” all refer to the order in which this sequence is actually presented in a novel.

These two things can be co-extensive to a high degree, as in the classic English novel of the 18th and 19th centuries by Defoe or Fielding or Dickens or Eliot or Charlotte Brontë, beginning with the protagonist’s birth and ending with marriage, success, or death. Or they can be highly discontinuous, as in modernist novels like those of Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, where the chronological events of the whole narrative—the rise and fall of the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury, for example—must be reconstructed by the reader out of a fragmentary, associative presentation.

Delany advises the creative writing student to remember that the reader never encounters the plot directly—never encounters, that is, anything other than the presentation, the formal arrangement. The plot only exists virtually, somewhere between the mind of the author and the mind of the reader, as an emergent property of what is materially narrated. The rise and fall of the Compson family exists only in our minds, and differently in mine than in yours, as evoked by the often mysterious words on the page. Students need urgently to be reminded of this lest they become too entranced with what only they can see and neglect to show it to the reader in any effectively tangible form.

I risk the above pedantry, Russian and all, to emphasize this: the way the story is told tends to be more important than the story. There aren’t necessarily that many stories.

I believe the canonical answer to the question, “What is the novel with the best plot?” is usually Tom Jones, but Tom Jones is a linearly narrated picaresque bildungsroman with a delayed revelation about the hero’s true parentage, a structure borrowed from ancient romance. Fielding’s merit is to decorate this very basic almost fairy-tale armature with about 1000 pages of rollicking and ribald eventfulness—not to mention extensive theoretical asides on the art of the novel, for me the best parts of the book. In other words, who cares about the plot of Tom Jones? The pleasure is all in Fielding’s performance.

Now I did criticize Martin Amis for pursuing similar tactics in his eminently Fieldingesque London Fields, but I did so because, coming as we do after Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner, we no longer need to steal a thriller plot—the way Fielding stole a romance plot—for a peg to hang the author’s sensibility on if the author’s sensibility is literally all we care about. Schopenhauer’s remarks on the novel may pertain here:

A novel will be of a high and noble order, the more it represents of inner, and the less it represents of outer, life; and the ratio between the two will supply a means of judging any novel, of whatever kind, from Tristram Shandy down to the crudest and most sensational tale of knight or robber. Tristram Shandy has, indeed, as good as no action at all; and there is not much in La Nouvelle Heloïse and Wilhelm Meister. Even Don Quixote has relatively little; and what there is, very unimportant, and introduced merely for the sake of fun. And these four are the best of all existing novels.⁴

Pace Schopenhauer, however, and because I like novels that represent outer life, the higher order of plotting per se comes not when a brilliant verbal acrobat turns a twice-told tale into a three-ring circus, but when an architect of truth builds a narrative structure for which the presented order of events is the novel’s meaning. When this happens, “[a]esthetics and ethics are one,” to quote Delany quoting Wittgenstein.

For his example of the best-plotted novel, Delany gives not Tom Jones but Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Its structure—the hero moves from social success to social success, each success being at one and the same time a moral failure—itself articulates the novel’s worldview without the author’s having to state it directly.

If Flaubert had simply explained how each social triumph was in reality a failure, the novel would have been banal. Again and again, however, its structure justifies Robert Baldick’s claim at the opening of his introduction to the Penguin edition that the book is “undoubtedly the most influential French novel of the nineteenth century” and makes it the novelist’s novel from its time. That structure is what makes the book about so much more than the social adventures of one moderately callow youth and turns it, rather, into the analysis of the dilemmas of an age.

By this standard—narrative structure equals worldview—the best-plotted novels would be, for example, Wuthering Heights (the narrative structure is the fall from romance to realism), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (the narrative structure is the growth of the hero’s artistic consciousness), Absalom, Absalom! (the narrative structure is the dialectical repression-revelation of the New World’s miscegenated ontology), Gravity’s Rainbow (the narrative structure is the parabolic decline of the modern into total administration), or Paradise (the narrative structure is the theophany of a metaphysic to dispel totalizingly oppressive social structures). All of these novels exhibit a certain almost trying virtuosity, however; we wouldn’t want every novel to be this way. Sometimes we want Wuthering Heights; sometimes we want Jane Eyre.⁵

Since anon inquires about my own work, I will say I have tried, in this matter as in many matters, to have it both ways: a Wuthering Heights that feels like a Jane Eyre.

Major Arcana has a non-linear structure. Its prologue is its climax. Part One first narrates the aftermath of the climax and then flashes back to the life stories of two main characters, told linearly. Part Two tells the mostly linear backstory of another set of characters born in the late 20th century and brings their lives up to the millennium. Part Three tells the mostly linear backstory of another set of characters born in the 21st century and brings them up to—and just beyond—the already narrated climax from the prologue, which itself stands revealed as a displaced chapter from Part Three. Part Four returns to the post-climax to provide the denouement. The epilogue tells you what happened just before the climax and why and then offers the finale.

That—Delany’s narrative structure, Forster’s plot, and the Russian Formalists’ syuzhet—sounds completely exhausting. If I’d schematized it that way before writing the novel, I would have given up in despair. Instead, I discovered the structure in the composition. I knew I would begin with the climax,⁶ but I initially thought what is now the first chapter of Part Three would be the first chapter of Part One, for instance. The urgency of my own discoveries—Delany discusses this, too—becomes the urgency of the reader’s. If you’ve read the reviews of Major Arcana, you will notice that many readers said they zipped right through the (longish) book in less than a week, the clue in the labyrinth being—and this is all I will say about the meaning of my own novel⁷—the journey from death to life, even if we have to face death around almost every corner to get there, to get to what is itself only a temporary resting place.

1. Henry also solicited my thoughts on Luca Guadagnino’s Burroughs adaptation Queer down in the comments last week, and so here they are. I didn’t love it. I wanted to, and I loved parts of it. They’re going to revoke my modernist card, but what I loved was the tight 90-minute exotic tragic romance inside this strained 140-minute detour into tropical psychedelia. Oh, you and I would have criticized that 90-minute movie for various reasons: we’d have said it was outdated in its fetishism of gay tragedy, even nostalgic (perhaps like I Saw the TV Glow) for the closet, just as it seems to be nostalgic for a time when men wore hats and slacks and sock garters, nostalgic for cigarettes and alcohol, nostalgic for a time when men read serious books, nostalgic for the American century as lived in America’s torrid periphery. We’d have said all that, yes, but still, the early double exposure sequences, where Daniel Craig’s Burroughs stand-in, poignantly repressed not in sex but in love, imagines tenderly caressing his young, diffident ephebe—those are memorable and (literally) touching. On the other hand, the late ayahuasca sequences are, if this isn’t too much of an oxymoron, predictably psychedelic, and the imagery withers in the vast shadow of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, which catches the general Burroughs sensibility in all its mordant grotesqueness much more effectively (though, in fairness, I haven’t yet read the novel Queer itself). If you can’t pull off “equatorial Cronenberg,” there’s no shame in “Merchant Ivory go to Mexico.” And were we meant to think by the end that the young lover was or has become some kind of government agent? If this movie was intended to be more than a tragic romance, not that tragic romance isn’t enough for me, then such a venture into Burroughsian parapolitical paranoia (“I can feel the heat closing in”) might have been more compelling than the jungle vision quest. Still, Henry’s original comment, calling the film “Death in Venice meets Altered States,” is the best possible spin to put on it—a tennis reference as I prepare to watch Challengers!—and maybe others will like it more than I did. (See also Mary Jane Eyre’s review; we’re agreed on the “Jumanji-style Jungian symbolism,” but I liked the film’s painterly initial aesthetic better.)

I also ended up writing, down in the same comments section last week, the capsule review of Sean Baker’s Anora I’ve been meaning to put into one of these footnotes for about six weeks now. I couched my positive judgment as an interpretation of the film’s controversial ending. I repost it here, lightly edited:

I honestly didn’t read the ending as a Brechtian-feminist attack on the audience, and wouldn’t have liked the movie if I had! I thought it was the immensely affecting illustration of the premise underlying the whole film, the slow novelistic melting away of the fairy tale and farce to get to the essentially sympathetic souls of the characters underneath, emblematized in some Levinasian way at the conclusion (I’ve never read Levinas) by Anora’s face in close-up, but also relevant in the cases of her kidnappers, who each also become humanized over the course of the film. The clue is in the early scene where she and her colleague are talking about her tattoos, and her co-worker has dollar signs but she has a butterfly—i.e., the psyche or soul.

2. Because it can double as an end-of-the-year best-of list, I will repost the following from my Tumblr. A reader inquired as follows:

Do you have recommendations for podcasts? Could be as edifying or stultifying as you like—I’m open to everything!

I replied: Mostly nothing I haven’t recommended before, but six suggestions, in alphabetical order:

—Art of Darkness: they’re on a brief hiatus now and undergoing a change of hosts (Kevin Kautzman remains, Brad Kelly departs, Abbie Lucas joins), with Brad potentially starting his own pod or some other project in the New Year; but whatever the future holds, the four-year archive will keep you busy for a long time (I think it took me six months to listen to their archive when I started back in 2022) with thrillingly exhaustive and discursive treatments of the dark lives of major modern artists, writers, directors, entertainers, occultists, and more.

—Eminent Americans: host Dan Oppenheimer surveys the intellectual, political, and literary scene in America, talking to an admirably broad range of guests: famous, non-famous, and infamous; left, right, and center. (Full disclosure: I’ve been on twice.)

—Great American Novel: long-experienced academics Scott Yarbrough and Kirk Curnutt devote each episode to novels that have been judged “great” and “American” from Moby-Dick to Beloved; it’s irregularly and infrequently updated, but they have a good back catalogue by now.

—Nymphet Alumni: razor-sharp post-Red-Scare Zillennial hostesses Biz Sherbert, Sam Cummins, and Alexi Alario entertainingly taxonomize fashion and pop culture from a thoughtful, theory-informed, and non-politically-didactic intellectual perspective.

—Stargirl: cultural critic and personal trainer Emma Glenn Baker surveys the contemporary pop landscape by carefully and artistically anatomizing the archetypes represented by the female stars of our era, modern and contemporary, everybody from Martha Stewart to Addison Rae to Dasha Nekrasova to Ottessa Moshfegh to Zendaya to Lauren Oyler to Hitomi Mochizuki to Willa Cather(!).

—Weird Studies: art in the broad sense—everything from cinema and comics to literary and musical classics—considered from a generally occult perspective, itself in conversation with philosophy and high theory, hosted with admirable circumspection by writer JF Martel and musicologist Phil Ford.

I dip in and out of a few political pods to take the discursive temperature but don’t necessarily recommend them and am certainly not endorsing anything you might hear on them. But for the record, Chapo Trap House still seems faithfully to represent the far-ish left; for the far right—and it is far right; you’ve been warned—there’s The Carousel with Isaac Simpson; for the center, Herzog and Singal’s Blocked and Reported. I’ll also apparently keep listening to Red Scare for as long as they make it; they’ll be recording, and I’ll be listening, when we’re all in the rest home.

3. What are the ethics of people on here reviewing each other’s books? Are we just replicating the logrolling and backscratching of the mainstream? In the post linked above, Naomi allows that she’s not going to pan the novel of someone like Ross. I think this superficial fact makes the situation sound worse than it really is, though. Most of the people who have found success writing online have done so because they’re good writers; as good writers, they’re probably not going to write really bad novels meriting some over-the-top denunciation. Most searching criticism is mixed; Invisible College listeners know I point out the faults in canonical authors all the time. I said I could write four or five bad reviews of Major Arcana myself. I also said The Default World is superb because it is, a rare combination of brutally unsparing social realism with a certain indomitable faith in the human power to transcend circumstance.

Now my own marketing strategy—am I being too candid?—has been to tie Major Arcana in to the whole aesthetic of my online presence, thus making it feel like a necessary component of this experience. If you’re already having parasocial dreams about me—see here, here, and here—you might as well pre-order my book so you can walk around in my dreams. And not only that, but also subliminally to associate it with the materials covered in The Invisible College, so that your end-of-the-year book stack might begin with Blake and end with Pistelli. (I spell all this out to spare the sociological critic any interpretive labor!) I think we’re shifting culturally not so much to a world in which we will turn away entirely from the internet but to one in which we will avoid its worser aspects (social media) and use its best aspects to augment offline experience. Viewed in this light, my whole online presence can be construed as an advertisement for a series of print books, including but not limited to ones I’ve written.

(I haven’t read Glass Century yet, by the way, but I’m excited to. “Jewish Don DeLillo,” Ross has labeled it, inspiring me to think of Major Arcana in turn as “Catholic Cynthia Ozick.” I own a galley, but I don’t have time to read it; I’m too busy researching a piece I’m preparing for a certain forthcoming literary journal. It’s Ross’s world; we’re just living in it.)

4. And then again they may not. I’ve read three of the four novels he pronounces the greatest—and if I haven’t read Wilhelm Meister, I have read The Sorrows of Young Werther and Elective Affinities and so am somewhat acquainted with Goethe qua novelist—and probably wouldn’t call them the greatest myself, though Don Quixote is certainly one of the great myths.

5. The linear novel also expresses a worldview with its structure, generally the Christian or crypto-Christian structure of the bildungsroman whose protagonists grew into the image (bild) of God in themselves. I don’t think it’s too controversial to say Jane Eyre is a Christian novel, while Wuthering Heights is not, is instead a gnostic-Romantic “bible of hell.” I address the implications for my own work in footnote 7 below.

6. I was startled to hear Brandon Taylor, in brilliant colloquy with Henry Oliver, speak of no longer beginning his novels in medias res because he doesn’t want to compete with cinema or TV. Beginning in medias res, however, predates the novel and is usually the more efficient strategy. Most canonical 18th- and 19th-century English novels are primitive compared to the Iliad and Odyssey, which are structurally closer to Joyce and Faulkner. Another piece of creative-writing advice I’ve always liked: begin as close to the ending as possible. Then, with emotionally associative logic, fill in the gaps as you go. But I read Watchmen and The Sound and the Fury and Beloved—and The Odyssey—in my teens, mostly before I started reading classic 18th- and 19th-century English novels in my college years. For me, the ancient-modernist procedure is the more natural one, and not movie- or TV-inspired.

7. I lied. One more paragraph, if you’ll indulge me. The magical realist element of the novel means there is a temporal distortion at work, a kind of time travel, difficult to discuss abstractly. It’s a novel about a comic-book writer who is also an occultist. Every page of a comic book, with its literally multiple temporal frames, tells us what every occultist already knows: on the highest level of consciousness, time can be experienced as space. But as every novelist knows, we live inside time, not above it, and have to make our choices there and nowhere else, except in those fleeting moments of peak consciousness. (The Christian, whose Deity designed time for His children to grow in, would likely agree, as hinted in footnote 5 above, as might such fellow monotheists as Jews, Muslims, and those secular liberals and Marxists who secretly derive their worldview from monotheism.) Major Arcana, then, in its structure, puts these two different conceptions of time—the occultist-graphic-novelistic and the monotheist-novelistic—into contentious conversation.