Reading for the Plotter

• Published in: New literary history Vol. 49; no. 1; pp. 93 - 118
• Main Author: Xin, Wendy Veronica
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.12.2018
• Subjects: 18th century; Actor-network theory; Aesthetics; American literature; Anxiety; Bildungsroman; British & Irish literature; Classism; Desire; Fitzgerald, F Scott (1896-1940); Interiority; Irish literature; Literary characters; Literary history; Melodramas; Mimesis; Narratives; Novels; Plot (Narrative); Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900); New York; United States > US; Chicago Illinois
• ISSN: 0028-6087; 1080-661X; 1080-661X
• DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2018.0004

For the "plotters" at the forefront of this article—literary characters whose plots spark narrative into being—the act of plotting constitutes an arduous effort to secure a better life, higher status, greater recognition, and a stable sense of identity. The promise of plotting is, for these knowing characters, a belief that their striving will finally pay off, the consoling yet often deluded faith that, by their schemes, their strategies, and their intrigues, they might one day be rewarded with the sense of assimilation or belonging for which they have so long and so laboriously struggled. In addition to serving a necessary narrative function, plotters alert us to a central paradox at the heart of novel form: while these figures rouse the novel's narratable contents into being, novels often secure their eventual closure by requiring the failure of precisely those plots and plotters on which they have previously relied. As such, the fictional representations of these social ambitions necessary for animating narrative beginnings often find themselves constrained by the discursive logic of narrative emplotment. Situated at the intersection of these contradictory impulses, the plotter emerges [End Page 93] as the figure for the novel's incompatible aesthetic and epistemological claims, showing how a set of affective dilemmas—melancholy, ressentiment, social anxiety, resignation, and passing, among others—take shape in the novel as representational problems embedded in the relationship between literary character, plot, and narration.