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Lecture 12: Narrative Without A Plot

Lecture 12: Narrative Without A Plot

Every work of fiction has a structure, but not every work of fiction has a plot, at least, not a traditional plot. Even if it doesn't have a plot, however, every work of fiction has, or ought to have, something the writer John Gardner called "profluence" which he defined as the feeling that you are getting somewhere when you're reading a work of fiction. Whether or not a story has a plot, something should change over the course of reading it, if not in the story itself, at least in the heart or mind of the reader. In this lecture, we'll explore a few ways to structure fiction that don't involve using the Freytag pyramid or the traditional plot.

(Proper terms for definition I believe are the story has great potential Progressive Influence, Skylights. —Lumna10)

Chekhov's "The Kiss"
The birth of the modern short story took place in the late 19th century with the Russian writer Anton Chekhov. In his story "The Kiss," the officers of an artillery regiment training in the Russian countryside are invited by a local landowner to spend the evening at his country house.
During the evening, the main character, a shy officer named Ryabovitch, wanders into a dark room and receives a kiss from a woman who has mistaken him for someone else.
The woman flees the room, and Ryabovitch is unable to discover who kissed him. For days afterward, Ryabovitch fantasizes about the encounter, inventing a whole future life with this woman, even though he doesn't know who she is.
At the end of the story, when his regiment returns to the same town and the landowner invites the officers back to his house, Ryabovitch loses his nerve and stays behind in the barracks.

"The Kiss" reads like a conventional story; the scenes are laid out in chronological order, with no flashbacks or flash-forwards. Yet the story doesn't come to a climax or resolve in the same way as a traditional story. Ryabovitch does not develop as a character. He has a brief glimpse of a more exciting life, but his only response is in his lonely imagination, and he does nothing about it.

The genius of the story is not so much that it's plotless as that it suggests a potential conflict, then refuses to resolve it. Chekhov sets up a binary question- who kissed Ryabovitch, and will he ever find her again?— and technically, he answers the question —no, Ryabovitch won't find the girl. That disappointment is the point of the story: The real question is not whether Ryabovitch gets the girl, but whether he can rise above his own timid nature; that is a much more profound and unsettling question.

Even though nothing "happens" in "The Kiss" in the traditional sense, something profound changes over the course of the story—not in the character or the situation but in the reader.

Joyce's "The Dead"
"The Dead" is the final story in James Joyce's only volume of short fiction, Dubliners. Instead of a conventional climax or resolution, the stories in this book rely on what Joyce called an epiphany. In religious terms, the word epiphany means a deep spiritual insight or realization brought about by divine intervention; Joyce used it to refer to an individual experiencing a moment of profound, sometimes life-changing, self-understanding.
"The Dead" is the longest story in Dubliners, and like "The Kiss," it reads conventionally; it's a chronological account of a party in Dublin in January 1904. Most of the story is told from the point of view of a successful middle-aged man named Gabriel Conroy. Near the end of the party, Gabriel witnesses his wife, Gretta, listening raptly to a singer performing an old Irish folksong.
In the cab on the way to the hotel room they've booked for the night, Gabriel experiences a powerful lust for his wife, but when they're alone in the room, he realizes that Gretta is upset. She tells him that hearing the folksong at the party has reminded her of a boy named Michael Furey who loved her when she was a young woman. Furey used to sing the same song to her and he probably died because he stood in the rain, waiting outside her window.
Gabriel realizes that to make love to his wife at this moment would be akin to an assault; thus, after she falls asleep, he simply lies awake in the dark next to her. Gabriel's epiphany is his realization that Gretta has never loved him as much she loved Furey, and he further realizes that he has never loved her, or anyone else, the way Furey loved Gretta. But instead of feeling rage or disappointment, Gabriel experiences a moment of expansive generosity for his wife, for himself, for Furey, and in Joyce's famous phrase, for all the living and the dead.
You might think that Joyce could have evoked Gabriel's epiphany in a shorter story, one that focused only on the aftermath of the party, but that simply wouldn't have worked.
The first 40 pages of the story, a chronological account of the party, are structurally essential to Joyce's purpose. Not only does he include details about Gabriel that pay off only at the end, but he shows us how a long-married couple present themselves to their friends and acquaintances in a public setting. This makes their moment of unexpected intimacy at the end even more poignant and piercing.
We need to see, at length and in detail, the life that Gabriel thought he was living in order to understand his shock when he realizes that nothing he thought about his life was true.
At first glance, the structure of "The Dead" is similar to that of "The Kiss." Both are chronological, both are centered on a party, and both are essentially a series of evocative scenes that do not make up a conventional plot. The final effect of "The Dead," however, is different from that of the "The Kiss" because Gabriel comes to a new understanding of himself and Ryabovitch does not.
Think back to the distinction E. M. Forster made between a story and plot: that a story tells us what happened, but a plot tells us why. Then think back to how a conventional plot does this: by posing a question in the form of a conflict, then answering the question by resolving the conflict.
The structural brilliance of "The Dead" is that it does not set up a conflict at the start of the story; instead, it holds your interest by giving you a plotless but entertaining account of its main character and his social situation; it then blindsides you at the end with a conflict that neither you nor the main character even knew existed.
The conclusion of "The Dead" is powerful partly because of what it says-that happiness is rare and precarious and sometimes founded on a lie-but it's also powerful because of the way Joyce plays with our expectations. He gives us what looks like an ordinary day for its main character, then surprises both Gabriel and the reader with something extraordinary.

Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
The use of everyday moments to build a picture of a world at a particular moment in order to reveal something profound also lies behind Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway. The novel is set over a single day in London in the early 1920s and focuses on a 52-year-old woman named Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party at her home that evening. Other major characters include Peter Walsh, a former suitor of Clarissa's who has just returned from five years' service in India, and Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of World War I who is suffering from shell-shock.
Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique in Mrs. Dalloway requires more concentration than following a conventional plot, but it provides a more vivid evocation of a particular moment in time in the lives of the characters.

There are only a few conventionally dramatic moments in Mrs.
Dalloway, including the suicide of Septimus Smith and the meeting of Clarissa and Peter Walsh after many years, as well as a few flashbacks. Except for the death of Septimus, it's a fairly unremarkable day.

Given that there's no conflict, no climax, and nothing to resolve at the end, what gives the book its structure? Instead of using a plot to structure the novel, Woolf uses two techniques, one of which governs the overall shape of the novel, and the other, its movement within and between scenes.
The overall shape comes from the fact that the novel is set over the course of one day, which allows Woolf to limit the number of incidents in the book and the scope of the characters.
The technique Woolf uses to make the novel flow from moment to moment is stream of consciousness. As you recall, when we read the passage in which Clarissa looks in a shop window, her thoughts shifted quickly and subtly from the world around her to her memories of girlhood, the last days of her uncle, and her relationship with her daughter. Each brief moment in that passage tells us something about Clarissa that we didn't know before. In other words, it is profluent enough without Clarissa having to confront or resolve a conflict.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Mrs. Dalloway is the way Woolf effortlessly, often suddenly, shifts the narrative's point of view among a number of characters. These shifts also provide the sort of narrative momentum that other, more conventional books rely on plot to provide. They enable Woolf to evoke a particular moment in time and in the lives of her characters far more vividly than in a conventionally plotted narrative.

Postmodernist Techniques
In this lecture, we've seen several ways to structure a piece of fiction that don't rely on a plot with a conflict and a resolution. Obviously, the techniques we've explored are not for everyone; most writers fall back on plot because it's easy and it's what most readers expect and enjoy. But trying to write a story or a book with an unconventional technique can make you a more observant, subtle, and engaged writer, even if you then go back and apply what you've learned to a more conventional narrative.

The type of fiction known as postmodernism is even more adventurous than the modernist works we've explored in this lecture. In general, a postmodern novel is one that calls attention to itself as a novel, plays games with language and with narrative conventions of plot and character, and constantly calls attention to the fact that it is a work of fiction.

Even if you have no interest in writing this kind of fiction yourself, it's worth looking into some of the stories and books of postmodernism, including David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Roger Boylan's Killoyle, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Kate Atkinson's Life after Life.
—James Hynes.

The Entire Stars Wars Cinematic Franchise from Prequel Trilogy, Sequel Trilogy and the shows between them including the famous "The Mandolorian Show" that kickstarted the fame for other tv shows to come every single one of those movie and show scripts were unconventional plots and that made them unconventional stories as well. You may first think the scriptwriters and directors lacked direction but actually they were more observant to subtle things you have to complete watching.
The Original Trilogy of Star Wars followed conventional plotline and made it a conventional storyline.
—Lumna10

Writing Exercise Prompt
Choose a single character and write about an hour in that person's life, limiting yourself to five pages. Don't pick the hour when something significant happened to the character-when he or she committed a murder or fell in love, for example. Instead, pick one of the countless hours in a person's life where nothing particularly important is going on. But try to put in as much detail about that person as you can, including memories or flashbacks that might be provoked by something as simple as a smell or an overheard comment. By limiting the time period and the number of pages, you provide yourself with a structure that doesn't rely on plot, but if you include significant detail, you may be pleasantly surprised at how much you can get across about the character.