585 Plots and the Modern Novelist (with Pardis Dabashi) | My Last Book with Anne Enright

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

History, Books, Arts

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As far back as Aristotle, plots have been viewed as essential components of long-form narratives. So what happened when Modern novelists like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Djuna Barnes began turning away from conventional plots? Why did they do this and what were the consequences for their art? In this episode, Jacke talks to Professor Pardis Dabashi about her new book, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel. PLUS Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright (The Wren, The Wren) stops by to discuss her choice for the last book she will ever read. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.
0:07.0	Hello, in 1927, five years after that miraculous year of Modernism, 1922, when both Ulysses
0:17.4	and the Wasteland were published, novelist E.M. Forster explained the difference between story and plot.
0:25.0	A plot is a narrative of events, he said, with an emphasis on causality.
0:31.0	The king died and then the queen died is a story, but the king died and then the queen died of grief is a plot.
0:42.0	Every novelist knows the draw of a good plot.
0:42.6	every novelist knows the draw of a good plot, it's the, and then what happened, and then
0:47.7	what happened, that takes readers from page to page.
0:52.4	Aristotle put it at the top of his list of key components of tragedy.
0:56.4	The most important, he said, character was secondary, but the two are closely connected. Character is plot, according to Aristotle, and
1:08.0	plot is character revealed in action. Sounds good.
1:13.0	And in some ways you can start with Greek tragedy and trace it all the way through novelists right to the present.
1:19.0	We like plots.
1:21.0	Authors like them, readers like them, they work.
1:25.0	And yet, and yet great artists like to get under the hood and take things apart too.
1:32.0	They want to be new, they want a surprise, they want a question,
1:36.4	they want to challenge. Maybe they want to work against convention or maybe they have different
1:42.0	goals altogether.
1:45.0	If anyone wanted to blow things up, it was the modernists.
1:48.8	You see it in Joyce and Elliot, and in music you have Stravinsky in painting Picasso. And so we have this curious example.
1:57.6	Plots and novels, sure that's one thing, but plots and modernist novels.
2:05.1	That's something else altogether. Virginia Woolf captured it in a word, calling it the tyranny of plot.
	...

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