Story, Plot, Right-hand Thumb

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STORY, PLOT, RIGHT-HAND THUMB

Roger Sale

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6

Literary Imagination: The Review of the Associationof Literary Scholars and Critics

6.1 (2004), pp. 115-29

My contention here is that story and plot are something authors and readers dotogether, and that we cannot get at why these give such worldwide pleasure withoutthinking of them this way. Since story is something that takes place in time, we distortit when we consider it as a completed thing, having organization and structure. In thisessay, then, I am concerned with negotiations that readers make with authors of storieswhile they read. I am interested in bringing up to full consciousness many acts ofreading that, for most readers most of the time, remain semi-conscious or sporadicallyfelt, and to do this I need you as collaborator to keep asking of yourself what yourexperience has been. I work almost entirely with specific works, mostly well-knownnovels, but I hope youll be able to find similar or related stories if something I discussis unknown or a distant memory to you.

As for the right-hand thumb. Nothing mysterious here; the right-hand thumbindicates how many pages are left, especially in relation to how many have gone by.Perhaps the earliest celebration of the work of this thumb is Jane Austens in the lastchapter of Northanger Abbey:

The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henryand Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final events, can hardly extend,I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of thepages before them, that we are all hastening together in perfect felicity.

The tricky part is to recognize the interest and importance of this information. All thatneeds to be said now is that the stronger the story, or the more highly plotted, the moreour right-hand thumb can tell us, which is to say the more clearly we can perceive theform of the work as we read.

If any of this is news, it is because academic study has taken us away from ourexperience as readers. In particular, there is narrative theory, and narrative is some-thing we study while story is something we read. There is also reader response theory,in which authors play no part. I am convinced that professors are ordinary people too,and partake of the great pleasures and inspirations stories and plots give, but dont writeabout them.

It may illuminate my intention, though, if I mention Peter Brookss Reading for thePlot. Brooks follows Roland Barthes in S/Z in trying to move beyond French formalistnarratology. Plot, for Brooks, is the organizing and intention of narrative, thusperhaps best conceived as an activity, a structuring operation elicited in the readertrying to make sense of those meanings that develop only through textual and

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temporal succession. Unsurprisingly, reading for Brooks is much more hermaneutical,much closer to psychoanalytic readings than it is for me. He assumes reading in mysense, so that the structuring activity elicited in the reader conveys no awareness ofthe communities created by authors and readers.

Perhaps the best known utterances about story and plot were made by E.M. Forsterin Aspects of the Novel. Yes, oh dear me yes, he says, the novel tells a story. Then as anexample of story he offers The king died and then the queen died. To differentiatestory from plot, he adds The king died, and then the queen died of grief.

Forster, it hardly needs saying, didnt care much for stories and plots. He was partof the whole modernist attempt to do away as much as possible with story as a way ofjettisoning all the novelistic baggage of the nineteenth century. Stories are low, atavis-tic. Sir Walter Scott is a good storyteller, people are stuck wanting to know what hap-pens next. However, The king died and then the queen died gets at nothing aboutstories except sequence, and Scott, though many of his novels are very satisfying, isfrequently an indifferent and obvious storyteller. As a plot, The king died and then thequeen died of grief doesnt do much to distinguish it from story. A century later, themodern has gone, and story and plot are still very much with us.

Rather than attempt a definition or a taxonomy of story or plot, Id like tobegin by looking at two works that I identify as having strong stories, stories readersget engrossed in and sometimes read rapidly, but almost no plot: Clarissa and Sons andLovers. In each an original situation not only sets the story in motion, but drives itpretty much the entire length of the book. After looking at these, we then can attemptsome discussion of basic terms.

Johnson: Sir, there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardsonsthan in all TOM JONES. I, indeed, never read JOSEPH ANDREWS.

Erskine: Surely, sir, Richardson is very tedious.Johnson: Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience

would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you mustread him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving oc-casion for the sentiment.

I suspect there have been more readers of this passage than there have been those whohave read Clarissa through; Johnson seems to be agreeing enough with Erskine thatthose who suspect that Richardsons sentiments are of a lofty improving sort havesettled for reading some abridgement.

Those who have read Clarissa through, though, can testify that it is a marvelouspiece of storytelling. Long as it is, it is all there, implicitly, on the first page: Anna Howesasking Clarissa for details of the quarrel between Clarissas brother and Lovelace, Clarissathe observed of all observers, Lovelace playing the Restoration gallant, James Harlowe

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clumsy and imperious. Though the pace of the story is slow, theres no filler, no elabo-rate descriptions of dress or landscape, and so little background is given that one has toread carefully to know why Clarissas grandfathers legacy is so important, or where theHarlowes live. Something is happening all the time, and Trollope is Richardsons onlyrival in being able to show, by repeating the same scene, how the situation is alwayschanging.

Richardsons storytelling genius lies in a careful calculation about how far we areable to see ahead, and when to give us some important event weve been anticipating.In the early going we learn primarily how and why Clarissa is the major power figurein her family even though the family is tightening its noose around her. Such knottedness,and its accompanying claustrophobia, so early in a long novel makes Lovelaces firstappearance as a letter writer, with all his lively showy manner, feel like a breath of freshair, an at last. At this point it is as though the book hasnt got thirteen hundred pages leftbut only as many as it takes for Lovelace to get Clarissa out of the house, which is as farahead as we can see, and which we want as much as Lovelace. The story is thus pro-pelled forward to that climax, at the end of Richardsons first installment, when Clarissatells Anna I have run off with a man. Another at last.

We are not quite a third of the way through, and knowing this makes everythingpreceding feel like a prologue. Again Richardson calculates superbly. Having gottenClarissa in her power, what does Lovelace want? We know only that if he wants her tosubmit, he will be disappointed, and we assume he will respond to disappointmentwith violence. Narratively, then, that violence becomes our target, the farthest point wecan see, and reaching it will yield another at last.

It takes a third of the novel to get there. As Lovelace tightens his noose, Clarissakeeps eluding him, but the right-hand thumb tells us that with so many hundreds ofpages remaining, she cannot escape for long, since he has many resources and shedoesnt know shes staying in a brothel. We also see that once again, in her confinement,she is proving indominable, and Richardson is facing us with the proposition that insome sense we want the at last, because the rape, when it finally comes, is clearly a defeatfor Lovelace: And now, Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.And I am Your humble servant, R. Lovelace. We still have many pages to go, so werenot as certain how to read these sentences as we would have been had they come nearthe end. We wont even know what happened, if we ever do, until Clarissas accountsome fifty pages later. So the act of reaching one climax propels us toward the next.Eleven words in a book of a million words doing so much work is about as strong asstorytelling can get.

We now know the book is about Clarissas gaining of power even as she is beingincreasingly cribbed, cabined, and confined. Clarissa reduced her family to threats and

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sputters, then Lovelace to rage and violence, and now, as Clarissas own letters becomeas infrequent as Lovelaces were in the opening section, she lives in a small corner of aborrowed room and is free to move toward her Fathers house, a tragic Protestantsaint.

If we can see story as something that authors and readers do together, we can saythat the matter of how far ahead a reader can see in Clarissa is integral to its story, whichis also its meaning. The point is crucial, but I dont want to argue it theoretically, onlyto suggest what possibilities for reading and interpretation can be opened up thisway. In this case the very slowness of the pace, plus Richardsons ability to write tensedramatic scenes, plus the epistolary fact that the narrators have little perspective onwhats happening, all do their work, too. Whats surprising about all this is that the greatvery long works before Clarissa, such as Orlando Furioso, Don Quixote, and The FaerieQueene, could have told him little about how to conduct his immense unfolding. Theyall work by interweaving a large number of separate stories and inset narratives so thatreaders have no choice but to give themselves up to one episode at a time; lookingahead simply isnt possible there. Few before Richardson had worked as he doestheauthor of Gawain, Chaucer in the Troilusand few attempted it after. As for the senti-ment in Clarissa, I have no idea what Johnson was referring to, but I cant believemany can find it anywhere near as compelling as the story of Clarissas simultaneouscapture and liberation.

Sons and Lovers has no sense of looking forward, no moment of at last. What pullsa reader along, and gives the story its strength, is something most readers in my expe-rience are not aware of except as a result. Absolutely, writes Frank OConnor in TheMirror in the Roadway, the first half of Sons and Lovers is the finest thing in Englishfiction. What makes this a plausible judgment, and what distinguishes the first halffrom the second, is the way Lawrence creates the Morel family. Open the book almostanywhere in the first eight chapters and see how one sentence leads to and causes thenext, so that the motion of the story feels secure and without need of any longer-termsense of direction:

Sometimes, when she herself wearied of love-talk, she tried to open her heartseriously to him. She saw him listen deferentially, but without understanding.This killed her efforts at a finer intimacy, and she had flashes of fear. Sometimes hewas restless of an evening: it was not enough for him just to be near her, sherealized. She was glad when he set himself to little jobs.

One might wonder how Lawrence knew so clearly what his family was like before hewas born, and the answer is that he only projected back the particular kind of bondingand connectedness the family had even in the terrible splitting apart of his parentsmarriage. In the above passage, Sometimes he was restless of an evening is not offered

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as a fact about Walter Morel so much as a consequence of Gertrude Morels flashes offear that a finer intimacy was not possible with him. Then she is glad when he sethimself to little jobs because he is restless yet not going out to the pub and his mates.She does, so he does, so then she does. Note also the way the repeated sometimesextends the action in time, doing the work here of the imperfect tense in a romancelanguage. Again:

Morel, almost against hope, grew better. He had a fine constitution, so that, onceon the mend, he went straight forward to recovery. Soon he was pottering aboutdownstairs. During his illness his wife had spoiled him a little. Now he wantedher to continue. He often put his hand to his head, pulled down the corners of hismouth, and shammed pains he did not feel. But there was no deceiving her.

The first three sentences move straightforwardly, then comes the back-and-forth that isthe rhythm of Morel family life: Spoiled him yields wanted her to continue . . .shammed pains which yields no deceiving her. Nothing remarkable in it, really,except that Lawrence trusts it so completely that Morel can hit his wife, she can naghim out of the house, Paul can wish his father dead, William can die because he leaveshome while still in bondage to his mother, and none of that can alter the essential factsof causality that bind the family and propel it forward.

But Paul Morel didnt die like William; he became D. H. Lawrence instead. Thereis no single crisis in his attempt to move away from home, just a series of struggles tofind a new footing. In the early scenes with Miriam and her family, Paul is still part ofthe Morel household, and the household is still a family, so the contrast between motherand girl carries the story along well. But when Paul is working at Jordans, and takes upwith Clara Dawes, the elastic in the rubber band, as it were, becomes much more slack.

At the end of Chapter VIII, Strife in Love, Lawrence attempts to put the story ona new footing, by making it explicitly Oedipal: Gertrude: Ive neveryou know,PaulIve never had a husband, not really followed by Walter, intruding on mother/son: At your mischief again? This badly distorts all that precedes it, and hereafterLawrence can find no sentence-by-sentence grammar to make the story work. Insteadhe transforms the book into a dream landscape in which Clara and Baxter Dawes playthe part of the older Morels, and Paul first fights Baxter and then works to bring himback to Clara. Theres some good eerie writing in these later chapters, but it reads likea different book altogether, and everyone acts as if drugged.

Since Lawrences sentences do not have to be noticed to have their effect, theyseem, by comparison with Joycean streams of consciousness and Woolfean lyrical adap-tations of them, to be traditional. If, however, you compare almost any scene in Sonsand Lovers that involves the elder Morels with, say, the scene in Middlemarch in whichLydgate and Rosamond Vincy become engaged, you can see how different they are.

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George Eliot relies on metaphor and symbol to describe the action, to explain it, and toweave it into the web that is the novel. The action is much quicker in Lawrence; onescene propels us into the next without a break, the story a strong straight line. He is,here, rhetorically much less distinct than Joyce, but his genius is more decisive.

There are two uses of the word plot in discussing stories, both in common usage,and in some sense one is a subset of the other. We speak of the plot of a story, any story,as in plot summary, which will simply tell us that the king died and then the queendied, or the king died and then the queen died of grief. Plot summaries are narrations,as it were, with the author and the reader pretty much taken out. This use of plot isclosely related to plotting a curve or a ships course. I want to get rid of this sense ofplot entirely because plot in this sense is almost a synonym of story.

The second use of plot partakes of plotting, setting a plot in motion, hatching aplot, thickening the plot. If we dont in common usage frequently speak of strongstory, we frequently speak of a strong plot, or a highly plotted story. There can beplotters in a story, and they are villains or heroes. The author can be a plotter withoutanyone inside the story plotting.

In order to describe the actions of stories and plots, we have to give up any ideathat we can make anything like absolute distinctions between the two. If we rely on ourcommon usages of words, we recognize there are many more stories than there arestories with plots. Then if we dont use words like strong or weak or tight orloose to imply merit or lack of it, we will have no trouble settling for comparativedistinctions, this being more than that, but less than the other thing. I want to constructa spectrum that moves from a highly plotted thriller novel to a consideration of plotand story in Dickens, and to end by looking at some great loose storytelling in GeorgeEliot, Trollope, and Tolstoi.

Barbara Vines King Solomons Carpet has an opening chapter that, we see shortlyafter weve left it, serves as a prologue. At a party in London some unnamed people playa kind of Trivial Pursuit, and one man asks, How many Metro train systems are therein the world? Bets are made, an answer is given (89). Then a young woman aboutwhom we know only that she is wealthy and has a heart condition, says, Ive neverbeen in the tube, and her brother says, Id like to raze it and plough over the site likethe Romans did with Carthage. We shift to the young woman in Hampstead buyinga dress and then deciding shell take her first ride on the Underground. She gets on atrain and discovers shes on her way to Bank and not Tottenham Court Road. The traingets crowded, she gets off at Bank in a panic, and it is rush hour. She gets on a CentralLine train that is crammed with people, her package is crushed and then dropped; shesuffocates, has a heart attack, and dies. Later the package with the dress is found andreturned to her family.

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Our attention then is shifted to a man named Jarvis, who is interested in Metrosystems, who is writing a history of the London Underground (from here on the textis laced with excerpts from this), and who may be the man who posed the originalquestion about the number of Metro systems. Jarvis lives next to the Metropolitan andJubilee lines in a large building in West Hampstead that once was a school, and we aresoon involved with people who also live in the school that is now a crash pad. Jarvis isin and out, his sister Tina lives there with her two children and a succession of lovers, asdo a couple who makes a meager living busking in the Underground. About them weget a good bit of background, then we have Jarvis and Tinas mother and her closestfriend, and Tinas son is with a gang of boys that rides on the roofs of Undergroundtrains. All this is told as straightforward realistic fiction with little sense of plot; certainlynone of those who live in the school gives the slightest sign of being a plotter.

Then, on page seventy-five, we have this:

In another part of Oxford Circus, a station where three lines converge, wherethere are fourteen escalators, four and a half miles of passages and platforms andthrough which nearly 200,000 passengers pass each day, a man was taking photo-graphs. People do not like being photographed on their way to or from work. They arenot on holiday on a beach. Most of them did nothing about it but hurried on,some scowling, one, a child, making a face at the camera, holding up his hands asif they were big ears and waggling his fingers. The photographer was a dark young man with a beard and very blue eyes. Hewas dressed in blackblack jeans and sweater. He began handing cards to someof the people who had let him take their picture. The cards had nothing on thembut apparently meaningless hieroglyphics and were thrown to the ground to addto the litter that so distresses London Transport. He turned his lens on a man who came striding through the concourse, hiscollar turned up, his hat pulled well down. Hat and collar together were insuffi-cient to hide an exceptionally ugly face, among other unattractive features a spoon-bill nose and inadequately repaired harelip. The man went up to the photographer. I want that film. The photographer smiled. He seemed pleased, satisfied, relieved. I said I want that film. You dont want your lovely face on record? Thats right. Now give me that film, please. People passing turned to look. This was more interesting than being snappedand given a card. I am at least as strong as you, the photographer said, and thoughtfully, maybestronger. But Ill give you that film gladly on one condition. That youll come upand have a drink with me. He opened the camera, took out the film and handed it with another smile tothe man with the spoonbill nose.

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This is important because it shows us story being invaded by plot and thereby raisesauthor/reader questions. It opens with sentences that belong inside Jarviss history ofthe Underground, but his are always printed in italics, and these are not, and this kindof mimicry is singular. Then we note that, for the first time since the opening chapter,characters are unnamed, and the plot-conscious reader now has at least that bridgeback to the otherwise forgotten but presumably still important opening.

People have been in or near the Underground since the opening page, so thesepeople belong in this story. Everything else, though, points to their being in the plotpart of the story and not the story part.

I make a lot of this because it and not some definition of plot or story is the way tomake the distinction between the two. A very active reader can make it right herewhile others, more content to let the book just happen to them, might figure thesenew guys are just another part of the zoo. The reward for the active reader, who nowfeels on the same wavelength as the author, is to see the photographer and the manwith the spoonbill nose reappear, not in those guises but, since that is their bridge tothe plot of the opening chapter, as unnamed characters. If one were really interestedin seeing how an author works, one would at this point reread the opening chapter tosee what details one might expect to reappear. Not Jarvis, since he already has beengiven a name, and not the dead woman since shes dead. The answers stand out a mile.

The crucial point for my purposes has nothing to do with finding out these an-swers as such. It has to do with being aware, becoming aware, of what it means to sayones relation in a story as an active reader is always with the author, and that thisrelation is the storys meaning. Vine and not any one character, obviously, has broughtus back to the narration of the unnamed characters. Vine has sent up signals to watchthese as we would not watch Tina, her children, her mother, and the buskers. The right-hand thumb notes that we are only on page seventy-five of a story of 356 pages. Anactive right-hand thumb would then note that this is too early in the story to let thedistinction, crucial here, between named and unnamed characters, carry Vine to theend. For one thing we have too much of an investment in the outcomes of the novel-istic characters to let them be simply the playthings of the plotters. For another thenamed/unnamed distinction is too blatant, too little interesting, to sustain another 280pages.

Straight whodunits, where readers know the characters are only cannon fodder,are frequently measured by the question of whether the author plays fair. With Vinehere, as with other writers of plots, where some amount of conceal and reveal is inte-gral, the question is whether she moves and keeps moving past the devices she so nicelyhandles on page seventy-five. My answer concerning King Solomons Carpet is mostlyaffirmative. Vine has a good instinct for which of her story characters will sustain the

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most attention; the trouble is only that the plot characters become predictable toosoon.

Forster rightly notes that reading a plot requires intelligence and memory of areader, and, we can add, respect for the readers intelligence and memory on the part ofthe author. Right-hand thumb can lead us to ask, Have we got all our characters andimportant places assembled yet? and, Am I clear what the has to happens are? and then,Are these materials exhausted? We are always seeking, as readers of stories do, thegreatest possible sense of mystery aligned with the greatest possible unfolding clarityabout that mystery. Aware of this, we need not worry if this or that is plot or story; thedistinction is useful only for readers to make as they become aware of their own read-ing, and of shifts in their relation with their author.

Let me mention briefly here signal moments, late in two great works, in which anevent is sprung upon a reader that feels like plot. In Ulysses at the end of the scene inNightown, Leopold Bloom looks down on the collapsed form of Stephen Dedalus andsees his son Rudy; in Oedipus Rex, Oedipus, Messenger, and Herdsman meet, as theyhad some forty years earlier, when Oedipus was given from Herdsman to Messenger.In each there is a sense of cunning planning by the author coming home to the reader.In Joyce, the pivotal moment of clarity leads us to the scenes in the cab shelter andEccles Street with an expanding sensethese are for me the best of Joyces pagesofhumor, failure, and wonder as a book that has little sense of story earlier now, and in anunforced way, reaches a climax. In a novel where the right-hand thumb tells us little,here it revealsthere are enough pages left for something to happenpossibility, of akind the novel has not shown to this point. In Sophocles, the right-hand thumb says solittle remains that the moment clinches the grip of the past, for the fled Jocasta, for theilluminated blind Oedipus, for Messenger and Herdsman, trapped now in roles theyplayed unwittingly then; its a great touch for a play that keeps showing how the wayahead is also a way back.

In contrast, think of works where something like plot invades a story late as adevice to get the author past difficulties that seem otherwise unresolvable. In Measurefor Measure, say, when Shakespeare awkwardly brings in Mariana in Act IV to providean appropriate mate for Angelo after the Duke exposes him in Act V; so too Sebastianenters in Act IV of Twelfth Night to facilitate the catastrophe, and Portia wrangles herway into the Venetian court to thwart Shylock. In Persuasion Mrs. Smith convenientlyturns up to expose William Walter Elliot to Anne. In Where Angels Fear to Tread thekidnapped baby is killed in a carriage crash to render all conflicts moot. In The GreatGatsby Mildred mistakes the driver of the roadster and is run down so her husband cango shoot Gatsby.

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Even the successful interventions, to say nothing of the forced ones, tend to giveplot a reputation of unearned contrivance, and to counter this we need Dickens.Dickens never abjured melodrama; he courted readers in serialized climaxes everyfourth or eighth chapter, and so we think of him as a writer who exploited the possi-bilities of plot. So he did, but this is far from always being the case. David Copperfield, forinstance, though Dickens own favorite, must be so only because of the opening third,where in instance after instance Dickens introduces adult assertions of power, bothgood and wicked, and David is forced to make his way without anyone being able totell him how to read his surroundings. No plot here, barely any story even. The rest ismarked by the tedious marriage to Dora, the badly underdeveloped story of Steerforthand Lil Emily, and a plot so pallid involving Uriah Heep and Mr. Micawber that Davidcan solve it the moment he sets his mind to it. This, though, is like many otherDickens works that celebrate his comic and satiric genius in the first half and thenassemble a plot to move the story to its end: Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, LittleDorrit, Our Mutual Friend.

Dickens greatest novels, though, are Bleak House and Great Expectations. They arealso his most lavishly plotted, and plotted in strikingly different ways. They can serve,then, as centerpieces for this part of my exposition.

Bleak Houses present-tense narration is filled with conceal and reveal, secrets fromthe past hidden, glimpsed, exposed. From the moment at the end of the second chapter,in which Tulkinghorn takes note of Lady Dedlocks shock after she recognizes thehandwriting on a legal writ, Dickens urges us to see plot come in to story. It comes inhere with Tulkinghorn, then with Guppy, a little later with Bucket. It is conspicuouslynot there in Esthers narrative, which is so scared of the implications of the past as to beplot-proof. Let us, Jarndyce says to Esther in his first note to her, take the past forgranted, and as long as they can do this they are temperamentally eager to try, and wecan watch the consequences of what happens when plot bangs at the door of story andthe characters do their best to keep it out.

Most readings of Esther are at least slightly askew because they stress either herinsipidity or her lack of perceptiveness, as though Dickens were presenting her as afigure to be evaluated. Others note all kinds of shifts and contradictions in her narrativevoice without being able to discover why. Ask what it takes to resist plot, to refuse to becurious about the past, and I think Esther becomes much more intelligible, consistenteven. When plot does not threaten, Esther can do very well; she knows right away whatis wrong with the Jellyby household, she understands sooner than those around her theprice Harold Skimpole exacts for being his acquaintance, and her apparent refusal tounderstand Mrs. Woodcourts insinuations about Alans attentions is only maidenlymodesty. But give her plot, in the form, say, of Jos If she aint the tother one, she aint

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the forrenner. Is there three of em, then?, and she makes no response at all. Give herBucket laying out his plans, and Esther pleads shes too bleary to understand. Above all,she cannot do anything with the knowledge that Lady Dedlock is her mother; shecannot even ask who her father was. All the processes that Alexander Pope insistedwere natural to the youngto ask, to guess, to know, as they commenceare forEsther threats to identity and security, and so she must walk around well wadded withstupidity.

She is the embodiment in personal life of the same insistent refusals, the sameobedience to established procedures, that are the hallmark of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce inpublic life. Dickens was willing, in novel after novel, to give us domestic bliss as thegreat good resting place, and to attack all that threatened it. But in Bleak House such anideal comes at a terrible price, in ignorance and stifling refusal. The nobility of LeicesterDedlock lies in his letting the Ghost Walk ghosts in; the monstrousness of John Jarndycelies in his insistence on keeping the East Wind out.

The right-hand thumb can start teaching us early on. The three detectives, wholead us and join us in our search for what revelations plot can make, are the villainTulkinghorn, the clown Guppy, and the bully Bucket. Learning this much, and learn-ing the potential prices of detecting for them and for us, takes us about a third of theway through. In the middle third, if we are able to bear in mind just how much we haveread and have left, we can come to seeit is such a strange fallout and it must come tous just before Bucket and Esther set off on their journey to Tom all Alonesthat good-ness in this novel is mostly found in people named Rouncewell. After that, with maybea quarter of the book to go, Dickens gives us the great chase and other simplifying andsolving satisfactions.

In Great Expectations everything is presented first as story and then as plot. For areader, part of the fascination is to see how absorbed, scared, and hopeful Pip is as theconvict, Estella, and Miss Havisham are thrust upon him as part of his story, then to seehim construct a convenient and false plot about his expectations in the second part,and finally to see how he becomes very much like a male Esther Summerson in thethird part, reacting to plot as it emerges, but as unable to see it, or his role in it, as Estheris. In Bleak House Tulkinghorn and Bucket can see connections between Jo at thebottom of society and Lady Dedlock at the top, but Esther cannot. In Great ExpectationsPip cannot imagine that his expectations come from the lowest rung on the ladderbecause he insists they must have come from Miss Havisham in the form of Estella. Plotthen turns story upside down, and we can see this, as Pip is never quite able to do, onlyin the later chapters, when the right-hand thumb shifts from a nearly inert bystander toa knower and predicter more alert than any character in the novel can be. By the timeEstella tells Pip she will marry Bentley Drummle, and Pip can only insist that she is

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never out of his thoughts, we know that in the number of pages left there is timeenough to strip Pips sense of high and low completelyMagwitch is Estellasfatherbut not enough for Pip to be anything but stripped as a result.

It was one of Dickens keenest insights to see that Jaggers, the Tulkinghorn/Bucketfigure, must in this novel remain passive, because what Dickens needs is not a knower,much less a pursuer, but an assessor of cost. In the great scenes Pip narrates his ownblindness as plot overtakes his story, and Dickens must do this compassionately, withoutany of the condescension that would result if someone in the novel were makingconnections Pip himself should have made, or be making. Pip never does see whathappens to him any more than Esther does, but the effect in his case is overwhelminglysad, not implicating.

6

Let me now place in a row three of the greatest novels: Middlemarch, The Last Chronicleof Barset, and War and Peace. Given its basic modes of perception and understanding,Middlemarch should have been a novel without a plot. We move from one character toanother, one little society to another; Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polishedsteel to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched inall directions. What will create form is only a lighted candle placed next to thepier-glass, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine surface ofconcentric circles. The candle, George Eliot goes on to say, is the egotism of anyperson now absent. Each ego is important, and society is only a loose connection ofegos and groups of egos. In such an arrangement you can have strong stories within asmall societyDorothea marries Casaubon, Lydgate votes for Tyke rather thanFarebrother, Fred Vincy gets into money troublebut the book as a whole is commit-ted to looseness and bagginess. George Eliots insistent relativism argues against hersuggesting that she or we should be seeking for a key to all its mythologies. No one, Ithink, reading the first half of Middlemarch, ever wished it were tighter and neater.

George Eliot, though, could not do without plot, not even here where her veryway of studying provincial life would seem to argue against its usage. Halfway throughwe are introduced to Raffles, smelling of plot, carrying nothing of Middlemarch orcountry society or anything else of the novels world to date, but a stale odor oftravellers rooms in the commercial hotels of that period. He blackmails RiggFeatherstone, of whom we know little, then he carries a letter signed Nicholas Bulstrode,of whom we suspect much. In his next appearance he is blackmailing Bulstrode andsummoning up a long forgotten name, Ladislaw, and he is now free to careen throughthe novel as no other character can. George Eliot is at the top of her powers in thisnovel, so she can write Raffles in with skill, but his presence is not only awkward but a

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compromise of what this novel stands for. Only an outsider could invade story asRaffles does here, but the illusion Middlemarch attempts to create is that it has no out-siders, only other scratches on the pier-glass.

The Last Chronicle of Barset was published in 1867, Middlemarch in 1871. At thattime no writer in English could be unaware of Dickens. George Eliots awareness wassuch that she could not conceive a story, not even her pastorals, without a plot intrud-ing fairly late to create a catastrophe. Trollopes awareness, expressed first in his lam-pooning of Dickens in The Warden, is expressed in The Last Chronicle in his opening witha mysteryfrom where did Josiah Crawley receive a check for twenty pounds that hethen cashed at the butchers?a mystery with at least as much possibilities for a plot asLady Dedlocks start at seeing Hawdons handwriting in Tulkinghorns office. He thenproceeds insistently to offer so much prosaic explanation into his mystery that by theeighth chapter, when Crawley is bound over to the assizes for trial, we know thatTrollope will tell us in his own sweet time how Crawley got the check, and it will haveno taint, as he might think of it, of plot or mystery or suspense about it.

Nor is Trollope interested in the kind of strong plotless storytelling I have de-scribed in Richardson and Lawrence. His unspoken rule is that all characters get asmuch attention as they need, and story is almost too strong a word for what Trollopedoes to achieve this. He fixes the character of his characters early on, and their circum-stances are seldom altered so much as to bring alteration in the character of his charac-ters. We know from the beginning that Crawley did not steal the twenty pounds andthat Lily will not accept Johnny Eames. What keeps us going, as readers? We can saythis: many young readers dont keep going with Trollope because there are so manypages in which so little happens. And this: most readers, even if they are Trollopeadmirers, feel at some point, between a quarter and halfway through, bogged down inTrollopes repetitions. And this: for most readers, that moment passed, the pace picks upas though Trollope had decided he must drive his book to conclusion with a plot,heroes, villains, voices from the past, chases, and rescues.

What drives this pace, though, is not events but Trollopes sense of the integrity ofhis characters, the rightness of their choices given who they are, so that even insistenceand stubbornness can feel like qualities uncovered by the pressure of events, or just thepassing of time. He makes us feel that other authors use their characters to suit theirends, while he shapes his ends to suit the character of his characters. The methodresembles that of soap operas, a multiude of stories, some of which intersect and somedo not, but the difference is crucial. Soap opera depends on scenes of confrontation andinnuendo into which characters fall or fit, while Trollopes eye is entirely on his charac-ters, so he will lead his characters to big scenes to see what they will do next. After Mrs.Proudies blowup with her husband and Dr. Tempest, how will she respond, will there

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be any shift in power? After Lily Dales accidental meeting with Adolphus Crosbie inRotten Row, what will she do to recover? After Mr. Crawley resigns his curacy, and theright-hand thumb tells us there are only two hundred pages left, what will Trollope doto effect Crawleys untriumphant vindication? There are satisfying scenes in Last Chronicle,and some excellent final scenes, including the deaths of Mrs. Proudie and SeptimusHarding, whose lives began thousands of pages earlier in the Barchester series, but thereare no climactic scenes: many has to happens but very few at lasts. The right-hand thumblearns to be patient and admiring.

If the example of The Last Chronicle is enough to show how absorbing story can bewhen it is loose and baggy and plotless, then that of War and Peace shows how goodstory can be when it is fragmentary over long stretches of an immense novel. My ownexperience may be revealing here. The BBC did an excellent fifteen-episode adapta-tion of War and Peace in the 1970s, and, never having read the novel, I proceeded toread it looking only for the scenes dramatized in the previous episode. When I laterread the novel through, I was startled to see how much smaller a role even the majorcharacters play than I would have thought possible in a novel. There is one stretch offairly strong storytelling (Anna Karenina and the short novels all show how strong astoryteller Tolstoi can be) in which Natasha, engaged to Andrei, has her head turned bythe wastrel Anatole Kuragin and almost runs off with him. Except for that, the shortchapters jerk and flit about, amassing maybe three times, to give us Austerlitz, Borodino,and occupied Moscow, and even then the short chapters jerk and flit about. What iswar? It is what people do in wartime. What is peace? It is what people do in peacetime.Since Tolstoi knows that the meanest soldier knew as much as Napoleon about whatwas happening at Borodino, it hardly matters who enters in this or that scene. We wantAndrei, of course, when we can get him, and Nicolas Rostov, and Boris, and the czarmaybe, and Kotuzov becomes indispensable, but to get war we cannot want or get anyof them very much. Attempts have been made since the book was published to saywhat it is about. If this essay has accomplished anything, it should now be possible tosay that it is about Tolstoi making his readers as eagerly passive as he makes his two so-called heroes, Kotuzov and Pierre. Tolstoi is as close as mortals get to God, imperturb-able, knowing that if we can learn to read his book we will have been taught how tolive life. There is no work at all here for the right-hand thumb.

Two brief notes in closing. First, if you work with some really short stories, such asMaughams Appointment in Samarra story, or Jesus parable of the wedding garment,or the Grimms The Death of the Henthough a good joke will probably doyouwill see how the negotiations change with almost every sentence, since after the open-ing almost every one is a has to happen or an at last, and surprise is the essence of itsdelight, or terror. Second, every reader can name at least some stories where the

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negotiations, after an initial effort on the part of the reader, just break down. Culturalgaps, created by space, or, more likely, time, can be just too wide for a bridge to be built.Though I feel I can do at least pretty well with the Hebrew scriptures, or Homer, I feelbafflement with much of Chretien de Troyes, or the Prose Edda, or, perhaps moresurprisingly, the works of R. K. Narayan. Its not a matter of a daunting medium (FinnegansWake, The Death of Virgil), or a daunting length (The Tale of Genji). I read along all right,its all intelligible, but I end up feeling my skill as a reader of stories has been thwarted.Fortunately, these failures themselves are reminders of how close stories are to being auniversal human language and how much pleasure can be gained by looking at therelations between most readers and most authors, no matter how far apart they mightseem to be.

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Story, Plot, Right-hand Thumb