Altaf Ahmed Sheikh 1 M.A (Hons.

)
English Literature

PLOT (Abrams)

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Plot. The plot (which Aristotle termed the mythos) in a dramatic or

narrative work is constituted by its events and actions, as these are
rendered and ordered toward achieving particular artistic and
emotional effects. This description is deceptively simple, because the
actions (including verbal discourse as well as physical actions) are
performed by particular characters in a work, and are the means by
which they exhibit their moral and dispositional qualities. Plot and
character are therefore interdependent critical concepts—as Henry
James has said, "What is character but the determination of incident?
What is incident but the illustration of character?" (See character and
characterization.) Notic also that a plot is distinguishable from the
story—that is, a bare synopsis of the temporal order of what happens.
When we summarize the story in a literary work, we say that first this
happens, then that, then that. . . . It is only when we specify how this is
related to that, by causes and motivations, and in what ways all these
matters are rendered, ordered, and organized so as to achieve their
particular effects, that a synopsis begins to be adequate to the plot.
(On the distinction between story and plot see narrative and
nanatology.) There are a great variety of plot forms. For example, some
plots are designed to achieve tragic effects, and others to achieve the
effects of comedy, romance, satire, or of some other genre. Each of
these types in turn exhibits diverse plot-patterns, and may be
represented in the mode either of drama or of narrative, and either in
verse or in prose. The following terms, widely current in traditional
criticism, are useful in distinguishing the component elements of plots
and in helping to discriminate types of plots, and of the characters
appropriate to them, in both narrative and dramatic literature. The
chief character in a plot, on whom our interest centers, is called the
protagonist (or alternatively, the hero or heroine), and if the plot is
such that he or she is pitted against an important opponent, that
character is called the antagonist. Elizabeth Bennet is the protagonist,
or heroine, of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813); Hamlet is the
protagonist and King Claudius

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the antagonist in Shakespeare's play, and the relation between them is

one of conflict. If the antagonist is evil, or capable of cruel and criminal
actions, he or she is called the villain. Many, but far from all, plots deal

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Altaf Ahmed Sheikh 2 M.A (Hons.)
English Literature
with a conflict; Thornton Wilder's play Our Town (1938), for example,
does not. In addition to the conflict between individuals, there may be
the conflict of a protagonist against fate, or against the circumstances
that stand between him and a goal he has set himself; and in some
works (as in Henry James' Portrait of a Lady) the chief conflict is
between opposing desires or values in the protagonist's own
temperament. For the recent exploitation of an anti-traditional
protagonist, see antihero. A character in a work who, by sharp
contrast, serves to stress and highlight the distinctive temperament of
the protagonist is termed a foil. Thus Laertes the man of action is a foil
to the dilatory Hamlet; the firebrand Hotspur is a foil to the cool and
calculating Prince Hal in Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV; and in Pride and
Prejudice, the gentle and compliant Jane Bennet serves as a foil to her
strong-willed sister Elizabeth. ("Foil" originally signified "leaf," and
came to be applied to the thin sheet of bright metal placed under a
jewel to enhance its brilliance.) If a character initiates a scheme which
depends for its success on the ignorance or gullibility of the person or
persons against whom it is directed, it is called an intrigue. Iago is a
villain who intrigues against Othello and Cassio in Shakespeare's
tragedy Othello. A number of comedies, including Ben Jonson's Volpone
(1607) and many Restoration plays (for example, William Congreve's
The Way of the World and William Wycherley's The Country Wife), have
plots which turn largely on the success or failure of an intrigue. As a
plot evolves it arouses expectations in the audience or reader about
the future course of events and actions and how characters will
respond to them. A lack of certainty, on the part of a concerned reader,
about what is going to happen, especially to characters with whom the
reader has established a bond of sympathy, is known as suspense. If
what in fact happens violates any expectations we have formed, it is
known as surprise. The interplay of suspense and surprise is a prime
source of vitality in a traditional plot. The most effective surprise,
especially in realistic narratives, is one which turns out, in retrospect,
to have been grounded in what has gone before, even though we have
hitherto made the wrong inference from the given facts of
circumstance and character. As E. M. Forster put it, the shock of the
unexpected, "followed by the feeling, 'oh, that's all right' is a sign that
all is well with the plot." A "surprise ending," in the pejorative sense, is
one in which the author resolves the plot without adequate earlier
grounds in characterization or events, often by the use of highly
unlikely coincidence; there are numerous examples in the short stories
of O. Henry. (For one type of manipulated ending, see deus ex
machina.) Dramatic irony is a special kind of suspenseful expectation,
when the audience or readers foresee the oncoming disaster or
triumph but the character does not. A plot is commonly said to have
unity of action (or to be "an artistic whole") if it is apprehended by the
reader or auditor as a complete and ordered
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Altaf Ahmed Sheikh 3 M.A (Hons.)
English Literature

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structure of actions, directed toward the intended effect, in which none

of the prominent component parts, or incidents, is nonfunctional; as
Aristotle put this concept (Poetics, Sec. 8), all the parts are "so closely
connected that the transposai or withdrawal of any one of them will
disjoint and dislocate the whole." Aristotle claimed that it does not
constitute a unified plot to present a series of episodes which are
strung together simply because they happen to a single character.
Many picaresque narratives, nevertheless, such as Daniel Defoe's Moll
Flanders (1722), have held the interest of readers for centuries with
such an episodic plot structure; while even so tightly integrated a plot
as that of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) introduces, for variety's
sake, a long story by the Man of the Hill, which is related to the main
plot by parallels and contrasts. A successful later development which
Aristotle did not foresee is the type of structural unity that can be
achieved with double plots, familiar in Elizabethan drama. In this form,
a subplot—a second story that is complete and interesting in its own
right—is introduced into the play; when skillfully invented and
managed, the subplot serves to broaden our perspective on the main
plot and to enhance rather than diffuse the overall effect. The integral
subplot may have the relation of analogy to the main plot (the
Gloucester story in King Lear), or else of counterpoint against it (the
comic subplot involving Falstaff in 1 Henry IV). Edmund Spenser's The
Faerie Queene (1590-9 is an instance of a narrative romance which
interweaves main plot and a multiplicity of subplots into an intricately
interrelated structure, in a way that the critic C. S. Lewis compares to
the polyphonic art of contemporary Elizabethan music, in which two or
more diverse melodies are carried on simultaneously. The order of a
unified plot, Aristotle pointed out, is a continuous sequence of
beginning, middle, and end. The beginning initiates the main action in
a way which makes us look forward to something more; the middle
presumes what has gone before and requires something to follow; and
the end follows from what has gone before but requires nothing more;
we feel satisfied that the plot is complete. The structural beginning
(sometimes also called the "initiating action," or "point of attack") need
not be the initial stage of the action that is brought to a climax in the
narrative or play. The epic, for example, plunges in medias res, "in the
middle of things" (see epic), many short stories begin at the point of
the climax itself, and the writer of a drama often captures our attention
in the opening scene with a representative incident, related to and
closely preceding the event which precipitates the central situation or
conflict. Thus Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet opens with a street fight
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Altaf Ahmed Sheikh 4 M.A (Hons.)
English Literature
between the servants of two great houses, and his Hamlet with the
apparition of a ghost; the exposition of essential prior matters—the
feud between the Capulets and Montagues, or the posture of affairs in
the Royal House of Denmark—Shakespeare weaves rapidly and
skillfully into the dialogue of these startling initial scenes. In the novel,
the modern drama, and especially the motion picture, such exposition
is sometimes managed by flashbacks: interpolated narratives or
scenes (often justified, or naturalized, as

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a memory, a reverie, or a confession by one of the characters) which

represent events that happened before the time at which the work
opened. Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman (1949) and Ingmar
Bergman's film Wild Strawberries make persistent and skillful use of
this device. The German critic Gustav Freytag, in Technique of the
Drama (1863), introduced an analysis of plot that is known as Freytag's
Pyramid. He described the typical plot of a five-act play as a pyramidal
shape, consisting of a rising action, climax, and falling action. Although
the total pattern that Freytag described applies only to a limited
number of plays, various of his terms are frequently echoed by critics
of prose fiction as well as drama. As applied to Hamlet, for example,
the rising action (a section that Aristotle had called the complication)
begins, after the opening scene and exposition, with the ghost's telling
Hamlet that he has been murdered by his brother Claudius; it
continues with the developing conflict between Hamlet and Claudius,
in which Hamlet, despite setbacks, succeeds in controlling the course
of events. The rising action reaches the climax of the hero's fortunes
with his proof of the King's guilt by the device of the play within a play
(III. iL). Then comes the crisis, the reversal or "turning point" of the
fortunes of the protagonist, in his failure to kill the King while he is at
prayer. This inaugurates the falling action; from now on the antagonist,
Claudius, largely controls the course of events, until the catastrophe, or
outcome, which is decided by the death of the hero, as well as of
Claudius, the Queen, and Laertes. "Catastrophe" is usually applied to
tragedy only; a more general term for this precipitating final scene,
which is applied to both comedy and tragedy, is the denouement
(French for "unknotting"): the action or intrigue ends in success or
failure for the protagonist, the conflicts are settled, the mystery is
solved, or the misunderstanding cleared away. A frequently used
alternative term for the outcome of a plot is the resolution. In many
plots the denouement involves a reversal, or in Aristotle's Greek term,
peripety, in the protagonist's fortunes, whether to the protagonist's
failure or destruction, as in tragedy, or success, as in comic plots. The
reversal frequently depends on a discovery (in Aristotle's term,
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Altaf Ahmed Sheikh 5 M.A (Hons.)
English Literature
anagnorisis). This is the recognition by the protagonist of something of
great importance hitherto unknown to him or to her: Cesario reveals to
the Duke at the end of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night that he is really
Viola; the fact of Iago's lying treachery dawns upon Othello; Fielding's
Joseph Andrews, in his comic novel by that name (1742), discovers on
the evidence of a birthmark—"as fine a strawberry as ever grew in a
garden"—that he is in reality the son of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. Since the
1920s, a number of writers of prose fiction and drama—building on the
example of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, so early as 1759-67—
have deliberately designed their works to frustrate the expectations of
chronological order, coherence, reliable narration, and resolution that
the reader or auditor has formed by habituation to traditional plots;
some writers have even attempted to dispense altogether with a
recognizable plot. (See, for example, literature of the absurd,
modernism and postmodernism, antinovel, the new novel.) Also,
various recent types of critical theory have altered or supplemented

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many traditional concepts in the classification and analysis of plots.

The archetypal critic Northrop Frye reduced all plots to four types that
reflect the myths corresponding to the four seasons of the year.
Structuralist critics, who conceive diverse plots as sets of alternative
conventions and codes for constructing a fictional narrative, analyze
and classify these conventional plot forms on the model of linguistic
theory. (See structuralist criticism and nanatology, and th discussion of
plots in Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 1975, pp. 205-24.) And
some recent critical theorists have undertaken to explode entirely the
traditional treatments of plots, on the ground that any notion of the
"unity" of a plot and of its "teleological" progress toward a resolution
are illusory, or else that the resolution itself is only a facade to mask
the irreconcilable conflicts and contradictions (whether psychological
or social) that are the true components of any literary text. See under
poststructuralism. For recent developments in the concept of plot, see
narrative and nanatology. Refer to Aristotle, Poetics; E. M. Forster,
Aspects of the Novel (1927); R. Crane, "The Concept of Plot and the
Plot of Tom Jones/' in Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism (1952); Wayne C.
Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961); Elde Olson, Tragedy and the
Theory of Drama (1966); Robert Scholes and Robert Ke logg, The
Nature ofNanative (1966); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Endin
Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967); Eric S. Rabkin, Nanative
Suspense (197 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (trans., 1977);
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Nanative Structure in Fiction
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Altaf Ahmed Sheikh 6 M.A (Hons.)
English Literature
and Film (1980); Peter Brooks, R ing for the Plot: Design and Invention
in Nanative (1984). Poetic Diction. The term diction signifies the types
of words, phrases, and sentence structures, and sometimes also of
figurative language, that constitute any work of literature. A writer's
diction can be analyzed under a great variety of categories, such as
the degree to which the vocabulary and phrasing is abstract or
concrete, Latin or Anglo-Saxon in origin, colloquial or formal, technical
or common. See style and poetic license. Many poets in all ages have
used a distinctive language, a "poetic diction," which includes words,
phrasing, and figures not current in the ordinary discourse of the time.
In modern discussion, however, the term poetic diction is applied
especially to poets who, like Edmund Spenser in the Elizabethan age or
G. M. Hopkins in the Victorian age, deliberately employed a diction that
deviated markedly not only from common speech, but even from the
writings of other poets of their era. And in a frequent use, "poetic
diction" denotes the special style developed by neoclassic writers of
the eighteenth century who, like Thomas Gray, believed that "the
language of the age is never the language of poetry" (letter to Richard
West, 1742). This neoclassic poetic diction was in large part derived
from the characteristic usage of admired earlier poets such as the
Roman Virgil, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, and was based on the
reigning principle of decorum, according to which a poet must adapt
the "level" and type of his diction to the mode and status of a
particular genre (see style). Formal satire, such as Alexander Pope's
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), because it represented a poet's direct

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