In Reading fo r the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984), Peter Brooks sets out to re-define the notion of plot, which he claims has been slighted by modernist criticism mainly as a counteraction to the overvaluation of plots in the nineteenth century, and which has been rendered static by structuralist narratology with its emphasis on paradigmatic structures of narrative. In his preface. Brooks defines plot as ‘the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a certain direction or intent of
meaning’, as ‘the logic or perhaps the syntax of a certain kind of discourse, one that develops its propositions only through temporal sequence and progression’/ The term ‘plotting’ perhaps better expresses his notion of plot; by plotting, he means ‘the activity of shaping, with the dynamic aspect of narrative— that which makes a plot “move forward” , and makes us read forward, seeking in the unfolding of the narrative a line of intention and a potent of design that hold the promise of progress toward meaning’ (p. xiii). The dynamics of plotting is activated by what Roland Barthes calls Ha passion' du sens^ which Brooks translates as passion of/for meaning, the desire to find meaning in the story as the narrative progresses (p. 19). Desire in this view can be seen to correspond to Freud’s notion of Eros, which seeks. Brooks reminds us, ‘to combine organic substances into ever greater unities’ (p. 37). Implicit here is a theory of narrative which necessarily— if unconsciously— subscribes to a teleological view of narrative.
Brooks’s notion of plot, moving beyond the static models of structuralist narratology, offers a dynamic model of narrative which underlines the presence of desire as the motor force of narrative. He finds a ‘rock-bottom paradigm of the dynamic of desire’ in the picaresque novel, which is one of the earliest forms of novel. Brooks identifies ‘Jack the Giant Killer’ as the most basic model of plot in the early development of the novel: ‘As in a great many folktales— the example of ‘Jack the Giant K iller’ and its permutations comes to mind— the specifically human faculty of ingenuity and trickery, the capacity to use the mind to devise schemes to overcome superior force, becomes a basic dynamic of plot’ (p. 38). In ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, Jack, a farmer’s son, has great
^ Peter Brooks, Reading fo r the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. xi. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text.
^ Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’. Communications, 8 (1966) 1-27 (p . 27).
success in the world by slaying one giant after another with his ‘ingenious Wit and Policy’ and his ‘cunning and sharp ready Inventions’."^ This basic model of narrative desire appears in a much more elaborated form in the modem novel since the nineteenth century. It is worth quoting in full the following passage in which Brooks’s narrative itself enacts the compelling narrative of the ambitious nineteenth-century novels which he discusses:
By the nineteenth century, the picaro's scheming to stay alive has typically taken a more elaborated and socially defined form: it has become ambition. [...] [The modem novel] makes ambition the vehicle and emblem of Eros, that which totalizes the world as possession and
progress. Ambition provides not only a typical novelistic theme, but also a dominant dynamic of plot: a force that drives the protagonist forward, assuring that no incident or action is final or closed in itself until such a moment as the ends of ambition have been clarified, through success or else renunciation. Somewhat in the manner of the traditional sequence of functions in the folktale analyzed by Propp, ambition provides an armature of plot which the reader recognizes, and which constitutes the very ‘readability’ of the narrative text, what enables the reader to go about the constmction of the text’s specific meanings. Ambition is inherently totalizing, figuring the self’s tendency to appropriation and aggrandizement, moving forward through the encompassment o f more, striving to have, to do, and to be more. The ambitious hero thus stands as a figure of the reader’s efforts to constm ct meanings in ever-larger wholes, to totalize his experience of human existence in time, to grasp past, present, and future in a significant shape, (p. 39; my emphasis)
In the passage above, repeated words such as ‘possession’, ‘progress’, ‘appropriation’ and ‘totalization’ enhance the sense that plot is what makes narrative a battlefield through which the hero single-mindedly marches ahead towards the final possession of all. Therefore, it is appropriate that Brooks calls these ambitious heroes as “‘desiring machines” whose presence in the text creates and sustains narrative movement through
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the forward march of desire, projecting the self onto the world through scenarios of desire imagined and then acted upon’ (pp. 39-40). It must be noted here that Brooks includes those novels which end in the ‘renunciation’ of such ambition for possession in his model of narrative, thereby (implicitly) including those with double endings which leave the possibility of either success or renunciation.
Brooks, like Propp albeit in a more explicit manner, excludes women, both as protagonists and as readers (note 'his experience’ meaning the reader’s), from this universal plot which, he claims, applies only to male protagonists. In describing what he calls the ‘female plot’, he changes his tone:
The female plot is not unrelated, but it takes a more complex stance toward ambition, the formation of an inner drive toward the assertion of selfhood in resistance to the overt and violating male plots of ambition, a counter-dynamic which, from the prototype Clarissa on to
Jane Eyre and To the Lighthouse, is only superficially passive, and in fact a reinterpretation of the vectors of plot (p. 39).
To lump these three narratives together, first of all, is nothing but reductive; it ignores significant differences between these male and female texts covering almost three hundred years.^ Moreover, implicit in Brooks’s theory of narrative is his assumption that the female plot is not only ‘not unrelated’ but subordinate to the male plot which he automatically considers to be the universal norm.
Brooks’s argument seems to be better testified in the simple narrative of the fairy tale. He finds the basic model of the female plot in the Grimms’ fairy tale ‘All- Kinds-of-Fur’, which for him ‘represents the female plot, a resistance and what we might
^ In To the Lighthouse, for instance, there are two stories of women, Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, which follow different plots. See Marianne Hirsch’s discussion of the novel in connection to Brooks’s narrative model in The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1989), pp. 108-118.
call an “endurance” : a waiting (and suffering) until the woman’s desire can be a permitted response to the expression of male desire’ (p. 330n). In ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’, which belongs to the same tale type as ‘Cinderella’, the princess o f extraordinary beauty is forced to leave her home disguised in a strange cloak made from all kinds of fur and with her face and hands blackened, because her father, the king, insists on marrying his own daughter. She has to endure living amongst the ashes like Cinderella as a kitchen maid in a foreign castle for a long time. By patiently dropping hints one by one, she, or rather her beauty, is eventually discovered by the king of the castle. They marry and live happily ever after.
In ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’, there is no ‘forward march of desire’ or ‘projection of the self onto the world’. The heroine is forced to run away from her home and patiently endures misery until she is picked up by a male saviour who marries her. She is more like a fixed point which is crossed by the two male characters, her father and her future husband. Sandra M. Gilbert’s analysis of ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’ suggests that the king who saves and marries her is the king who is her father and her persecutor.^ ‘All-Kinds-of- F u r’, then, can be read as a male tale seen through the eyes of a female character who, at the end of the story, is conquered by the hero whose possession of her she has resisted.^
Apparently, Brooks believes that there are two kinds of plots, male and female. In his description of plot, however, there is only one vector of plot, the one that belongs to the male protagonist. He states that the female plot is ‘in resistance’ and ‘counter dynamic’ to the male plot, and that the desire of the heroine is to ‘wait’ to be a
^ See Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Life’s Empty Pack: Notes Toward a Literary Daughteronomy’,
Critical Inquiry, 11 (1985), 355-84.
^ Jean Cocteau’s film version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ makes the heroine marry the man whom she has once refused, revealing even more clearly that the tale is about the male subject’s conquest of a woman who is the object of his desire.
‘permitted response’ to the male desire. Here lies the contradiction in his theorisation, for it is difficult to associate heroines’ acts of ‘waiting’ until ‘permitted’ and of ‘resisting’ male violence, with the notion of desire as it is described by Brooks. In Brooks’s view, heroines’ such ‘superficial passivity’ never amounts to real activity which he assumes to be a male prerogative. His overtly masculine conception of plot— he speaks of narrative desire as ‘erection’ and as ‘tumescence’ (pp. 51, 103)— incorporates the notion of the female plot into the logic of the male plot, positing the former as the counter-dynamic of the latter which, as his argument proceeds, nonetheless presents its universality. The female plot, then, is inevitably defined and shaped by the male plot, working inside the logic of the male plot. It has no vector of its own, itself a static point only to be passed through, ‘enduring’, ‘waiting’, and ‘suffering’. We may call both these plots— the male and the female plots as described by Brooks—masculine, for they both work according to the same masculine conception of narrative desire.
Brooks’s understanding of (masculine) plot is confirmed by Jurij Lotman’s essay entitled ‘The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology’ (1973). In primordial myths, according to Lotman, there are only two characters, a hero and an obstacle. In the later development which he defines as ‘linear’ unfolding of ‘cyclical’ texts, characters are multiplied as doubles, so that they ‘can be divided into those who are mobile, who enjoy freedom with regard to plot-space, who can change their place in the structure of the artistic world and cross the frontier, the basic topological feature of this space, and those who are immobile, who represent, in fact, a function of this space’.* Lotman’s following passage on the movement o f plot makes explicit that these mobile and immobile
characters are gendered:
Jurij Lotman, ‘The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology’, trans. by Julian Graffy,
The elementary sequence of events in myth can be reduced to a chain: entry into closed space— emergence from it (this chain is open at both ends and can be endlessly multiplied). Inasmuch as closed space can be interpreted as ‘a cave’, ‘the grave’, ‘a house’, 'woman', (and, correspondingly, be allotted the features of darkness, warmth, dampness), entry into it is interpreted on various levels as 'death’,
‘conception’, ‘return home’ and so on; moreover all these acts are thought of as mutually identical.^
Here, the pattern male/hero/mover and female/obstacle/space is considered as universal, defining the structural organisation of the original plot. Within this topological scheme, the obstacles, regardless of their gender, invariably represent the womb— ‘dark’, ‘warm’, and ‘damp’— and its equivalent, woman. The masculine notion of plot, therefore, is a staging of a two-character drama in which the male subject penetrates woman-space to overcome death.
Referring to Lotman’s passage cited above, Teresa de Lauretis argues that sexual difference is what drives narrative forward:
The implication here is not inconsequential. For if the work of the mythical structuration is to establish distinctions, the primary distinction on which all others depend is not, say, life and death, but rather sexual difference. In other words, the picture of the world produced in mythical thought since the very beginning of culture would rest, first and foremost, on what we call biology. Opposite pairs such as inside/outside, the raw/the cooked, or life/death appear to be merely derivatives of the fundamental opposition between boundary and passage; and if passage may be in either direction, from inside to outside or vice versa, from life to death or vice versa, nonetheless all these terms are predicated on the single figure of the hero who crosses the boundary and penetrates the other space. In so doing the hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance.
matrix and matter.
Here, one can recognise the full implication of Brooks’s use of the term ‘resistance’ to describe the female plot. Brooks’s definition of narrative desire as possession and appropriation confirms de Lauretis’s view on the implication of sadistic desire in narrative. Reversing Laura Mulvey’s phrase beginning with ‘sadism demands a story’,** de Lauretis defines narrative as follows: ‘story demands sadism, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end’.*" For both Brooks and de Lauretis, desire plays a significant role in narrative structuration; both underline the dynamics of narrative, how narrative functions and engages the reader in the process of its progress. However, de Lauretis reminds us that we need to ask not only what drives the narrative, but also whose desire is at work in its structuration. The female character represents ‘obstacles’ whose function is to ‘resist’ the male penetrator who, in his quest to possess all, re-creates the fundamental distinction which makes possible this universal drama between the two sexes. The result is always the same, for, in this scheme, there is only one desire, the desire of the masculine subject.
‘There is only one libido’, says Freud.*^ In his lecture on ‘Femininity’ (1933), Freud claims that libido, ‘the motive force of sexual life’, is ‘dominated by the polarity of masculine-feminine’; however, he goes on to argue that ‘there is only one libido, which
*° De Lauretis, p. 119.
** Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16 (1975), 6-18 (p. 14).
*^ De Lauretis, pp. 132-33.
*^ Freud, ‘Femininity’, in The Penguin Freud Library (hereafter abbreviated to PFL), 15 vols, trans. by James Strachey, ed. by Angela Richards and Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990-93), 11, pp. 145-69 (p. 165).
serves both the masculine and the feminine sexual functions’. T o understand what Freud means here, I will first examine his definition of masculinity and femininity.
Freud defines femininity as ‘giving preference to passive aims’, which is not, he stresses, ‘the same thing as passivity’, for ‘to achieve a passive aim may call for a large amount of activity’.*^ The preference either of an active aim (= masculinity) or of a passive aim (= femininity) is determined on the model of the sexual life:
The male sex-cell is actively mobile and searches out the female one, and the latter, the ovum, is immobile and waits passively. This behaviour of the elementary sexual organisms is indeed a model for the conduct of sexual individuals during intercourse. The male pursues the female for the purpose of sexual union, seizes hold of her and
penetrates into her.^^
Freud’s notion of masculinity and femininity, derived from the biological metaphors of the mobile sperm and the immobile ovum, bears a remarkable resemblance to Lotman’s topological idea of the original plot in which the male mover penetrates the female topos.
Although he claims that ‘we cannot assign any sex’ to the libido itself, Freud is nonetheless ‘inclined to describe it as masculine’.M o r e o v e r , it become clear that, in his view, it is only men who actually have access to the libido when one reads his following account of biological teleology:
Furthermore, it is our impression that more constraint has been applied to the libido when it is pressed into the service of the feminine function, and that— to speak teleologically—Nature takes less careful account of its [that function’s] demands than in the case of masculinity. And the reason for this may lie— thinking once again teleologically— in the fact that the accomplishment of the aim of biology has been entrusted to the
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‘Femininity’, p. 165. ‘Femininity’, p. 149.
‘Femininity’, p. 148; my emphasis. ‘Femininity’, p. 165.
aggressiveness of men and has been made to some extent independent of women’s consent/^
In this passage, sadism looms large as that which drives the story of Nature towards its end; male sadism becomes biological necessity. Again, story demands sadism. Nature’s disregard of the feminine function, continues Freud, is confirmed by the ‘sexual frigidity’ frequently found in w o m e n . I t seems that his story not only demands sadism on his side but, to complement his purpose, masochism in his object, woman, and this is forcibly justified by Freud. He maintains that masochism is ‘truly feminine’ since the suppression of aggressiveness thus required of the female in her sexual life leads to ‘the development of powerful masochistic impulses’ in women."® The logic of Freud’s argument here is, as I remarked, forcible; women must not desire anything since ‘the aim of biology’ requires so. Freud denies the juxtaposition ‘feminine libido’ outright,"* thereby denying the possibility that there may be a libido in women which does not conform to the only libido he can imagine, which is masculine and sadistic. Freud’s story of sexual life demands