Criticism of James Wood, and the differences between Plot, Story and Narrative
As noted earlier, one of the main criticisms of James Wood’s How Fiction Works is that it lacks discussion of plot. I see his book as a polemic in favour of those elements he deems essential to greatness; plot just doesn’t figure here. And when I think about those novels I consider to be the best: The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, The Red and the Black, Disgrace, I must agree. In these and other great works, Don Quixote for example, the author simply runs the tape of life. Events happen, characters deal with them. War rages in the fore and background, people fall in love with people who don’t love them back, people die, okay, occasionally someone murders someone…and then lives, or tries to live with the guilt; someone gets raped, and lives with the shame; someone marries the wrong person; has an affair; gets pregnant. Regular day-to-day shit happens kind of stuff. Plot doesn’t loom very large. We don’t worry so much about the why, as about the how.
So, if we classify Wood’s work as a polemic, David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction, and John Mullen’s How Novels Work must be taxonomies. What do they have to say about plot? Not much. Mullen devotes three out of 346 pages to it. And there are fifty category chapters in Lodge’s book, plot is not one of them.
In this three pages Mullen does however provide a very useful distinction:
"We can think of a novel’s story as the material of its events and characters – what happens in it…The narrative is the way the story is told…Plot is something else again. We sometimes talk of a plot being ‘unravelled’, for it is the causal chain that connects events and characters. We discover the plot as we read, so the plot-driven author must conceal connections as well as eventually reveal them. A plot has clues or hints in one part of the narrative, suggesting that something will be explained in another part. If a plot is paramount, a novelist must foresee the end before finalizing the beginning."
E.M. Forster on the other hand devotes some 15 pages to plot. I’ll look at them shortly.
