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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 9/28/2009
I probably achieve utter absurdity with my new Strange Horizons column, "A Story About Plot", wherein, like an awkward and amateur trapeze artist who has decided the key to success is to not believe in gravity, I try to link John Grisham, Nora Roberts, Aristotle, Shklovsky, and Peter Straub. The whole thing is, I expect, more a sign of my inevitable insanity than anything else.
By: Matthew Cheney,
on 3/25/2008
Victor Shklovsky, from Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot
In the long story "My Life", Chekhov wrote about a bad architect who designed buildings so badly, planned the interiors so poorly, the facades were all so hideous that people simply got used to the style of this person.For another excerpt, see here.
The style of failure becomes the style of the town.
Chekhov hated expositions and denouements; he is the one who revived the two concepts.
I'll repeat once more about how he wrote to his brother saying that the plot must be new and a story isn't always necessary.
By plot he meant the false theatre, the poetics of that theatre, especially the expositions and denouements of plays -- things that the viewer is anticipating with pleasure.
It's like a shot of morphine.
Literature became a place of false denouements, false expositions, false successes, the successes of individual people.
The young boys -- the fugitive convicts who turned rich and cried on the graves of their comrades who didn't fall under the protection of the ancient plot, the happy ending.
Even Dickens, after his discovery of ancient plot, got so bloated that he resembled an old sunken boat.
Chekhov is the most desperate of all writers, he is the most straightforward one.
He doesn't want to soften, loosen the threads of life, he doesn't want to be capable of bending them to make a false happy end.
By: Matthew Cheney,
on 8/25/2007
At The Valve, John Holbo just posted this cover from the June 1953 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries:
Yes, indeed -- Ayn Rand and Franz Kafka in one pulp magazine together! But it's better than that. Here's the entire table of contents:
Worms of the Earth by Robert E. HowardYes, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, and Franz Kafka all in one issue! (All reprints -- I would love to know what went through Mary Gnaedinger's mind as she put it together...) As noted at The Valve, this was the final issue of FFM, "after which the magazine evidently died of confusion."
Pendulum by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse
Bernie Goes to Hell by Arthur Dekker Savage
Find the Happy Children by Benjamin Ferris
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Haunted Hostel by Emma L'Hommedieu Frost
Dirge (Aztec) by Louis M. Hobbs
Anthem by Ayn Rand
on the internet is going for $61, and it usually sells for around $100 or more. If anybody out there has bucks to burn and wants to send me a gift, though, I wouldn't complain... (It's the mix that's appealing; even in high school I thought Anthem was badly written, and I've never had much of a taste for Robert E. Howard, but that contents page is enough to cause the covetous consumerist impulses to stir in even the most mild mannered of us.)
I'm not sure I get your distinction between storyline and plot. We are always able to draw arbitrary semantic distinctions, but they may be distinctions without a difference. Whatever you want to call it, there are so many more "things happening" in a bestseller by Grisham, Connelly, John Twelve Hawks, Dan Brown, what have you, than in a more "literary" book. If you count "things happening" as "things happening in the narrator's head" too, then Marcel Proust may be seen as tightly plotted.
So many "literary" works have little to no plot. Updike's RABBIT, RUN has verbose description of the narrator endlessly driving for what, over 100 pages? Same with David Gates' JERNIGAN. Elizabeth Hand's GENERATION LOSS has the narrator's decades-long sex and drug lifestyle summarized in the first few pages before it hits a brick wall of endless description of taking a trip to some small Northeastern island. The difference between these kinds of books is so obvious and THERE.
I get the distinction between story and plot - story is what happened, plot is how you tell it.
However, I think plot is built of conflict. Stuff happening or being described is not plot (or is weak plot).