Plot and pattern

It is certainly true, as my critics protest, that there is more than one way to hold a novel together. There is, for example, the dramatic monologue—boring, and cut off from the main stream of the novel’s history, but available to all would-be “experimental writers.” Trickier to pull off, but also more promising, is what A. S. Byatt calls, with rather more of a verbal shrug than one would expect from a first-rate novelist, “poetic form.”

In the Introduction to the Oxford Classics edition of Middlemarch, Byatt writes that the novel is “held together . . . by a web of metaphors, interlinked and constantly developing and modifying each other, of which the web itself is a central example.” After connecting the dominant image of the web to “the image of eyes and light,” and after tracing Eliot’s dancing pattern of webs and eyes, Byatt concludes: “Such connections are mode than decorative or instructive; they are a form of discovery and creation, a mode of knowledge and the medium of art.”

Perhaps Daniel Green would prefer Byatt’s critical language, or at least her authority. But Byatt is not really saying anything much different from what I have been holding about plot.

The novel is a pattern art; the pattern, usually a plot but occasionally (rarely) a substitution for it, is the intellectual element in fiction; not Aristotelian dianoia but intellectual patterning, customarily by means of an ingenious plot, is where a novelist’s thought is to be found.

The rest of Green’s objections to my case can be easily dispensed with.

“If plot is not a logical structure,” he asks, “how can it serve the same purpose as argument?” Because argument is the organizing principle in philosophy. Logic is the method by which philosophical argument is conducted: it is peculiar to philosophy. Plot is (almost always) the method by which a novel’s “argument” is conducted. It is fiction’s answer to philosophy.

“Why is it assumed that every novel has a ‘central theme’?” Green goes on. “Don't some novelists work without the assumption of a ‘theme’?” To answer in reverse order. No, and because, as in music, novels operate by means of announcing the theme and then developing and varying it. You will notice that I am using the term theme in its Nabokovian sense. Theme is not dianoia; it is not, that is, simply the novelist’s speech. It is an element, the central element, in the novel’s pattern.

All of the remainder of Green’s questions (“How do we decide which [theme] the plot is validating?” “How do we know that [The Age of Innocence] was written to ‘verify’ this theme?”) can be answered with a single word. By argument. The critic is related by marriage to the philosopher. He must present a case for his assertions. I recommend that Daniel Green try it some time.