Where have all the good plots gone?

Where have all the good plots gone?
Long time passing . . .
Where have all the good plots gone?
Long time ago.
Where have all the good plots gone?
Gone to Tolkien, every one . . .
When will they ever learn?
When will they every learn?

I'll start with a confession: I recently read The Da Vinci Code. Here's another confession: I was embarrassed, as a reader with highbrow pretensions, to be reading a popular "mystery" novel. Final confession: I liked it. Now, I have no illusions that The Da Vinci Code is a great work of literature, and I'm not very -- well, not at all -- familiar with the mystery genre, but the novel was a darned fun read. I was completely caught up in the pleasure of wanting to find out what happens next, and I was, at the same time, struck by how little of that kind of pleasure "serious" contemporary fiction affords. Not so long ago, serious authors understood the pleasure a reader derives from a well-constructed plot; what's more, they grasped the importance of plot as the surest way to reveal character, for, as George Eliot astutely remarked, "[o]ur deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds." Thus, the great nineteenth century novelists paid as much attention to the ways in which our deeds determine us as they did to the ways in which we determine our deeds. Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Little Dorrit, The Return of the Native, Tess of the Durbervilles, Wuthering Heights, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina -- those are all magnificent works of literature, and, in the best sense, page-turners. And Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, two miracles of Western civilization, are also, in a sense, murder mysteries. Of course, great works of recent fiction still exist, but with the exception of Tolkien (of whom more later) and a few others, they don't contain great plots anymore. What happened between then and now?

To begin to answer that question, I want to start with Martin Amis's observations about the modern novel par excellence, James Joyce's Ulysses:

What, nowadays, is the constituency of Ulysses? Who reads it? Who curls up with Ulysses? It is thoroughly studied, it is exhaustively unzipped and unseamed, it is much deconstructed. But who reads Ulysses for the hell of it? I know a poet who carries Ulysses around with him in his satchel. I know a novelist who briefly consults Ulysses each night upon retiring. I know an essayist who wittily featurs Ulysses on his toilet bookshelf. They read it -- but have they read it, in the readerly fashion, from beginning to end? For the truth is that Ulysses is not reader-friendly. Famously James Joyce is a writers' writer. Perhaps one could go further and say that James Joyce is a writer's writer. He is auto-friendly; he is James Joyce-friendly.

Now, don't get me wrong. Ulysses is undoubtedly a great novel, one of the greatest of the twentieth century. But it also, for better and worse, signals the dawn of the self-consciously modernist novel, the novel of technical innovation and ironic sensibility, the novel that has become increasingly and predictably about itself -- and sometimes about little else. The "auto-friendliness" that Martin Amis describes has become, post-Ulysses, a sentry which polices the border between "high art" and "mid-cult," and good stories are generally relegated to the middle-to-low-brow side of the divide, partly because the resentment of general or popular audiences toward the perceived scorn of the modernist writer tends to reinforce the modern novelist's sense of himself as a member of a literary priesthood writing from the cloister of his exquisite sensibility for the "fit audience though few" who can appreciate him. "The great unwashed like a good story? Well, good stories be damned! I write for the hale and hardy few on the wind-swept heights who aren't afraid to look into the abyss." Nietzsche famously observed that "when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you." Well, the abyss has been looking into us -- in the form of the modern novel -- for over well over half a century now, and I'm guessing that it is bored out of its skull.

So here we are. We have to choose, for the most part, between good stories and serious literature. Philip Pullman, accepting the Carnegie medal for children's fiction in July 1996, summed up the situation beautifully:

[I]n adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult readers who do deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship. But stories are vital. Stories never fail us, because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, "events never grow stale." There's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy. [Contemporary writers, however,] take up their stories as with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do.

And that's precisely why some of us cling to Tolkien, the anti-Joyce , the profoundly anti-modernist outcast, shunned -- until very recently, perhaps -- by the high priests of prose. Tolkien had the temerity to give us great literature and an enthralling story at the same time. When that happens at all nowadays, it tends to happen in the ghettoes of "genre fiction." And when it does happen in "serious" fiction -- as it does in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Life of Pi -- it tends to be marred just slightly by a certain self-consciousness, a last-moment authorial flinching that is quite pronounced, for instance, in the case of Pi with its postmodern cop-out ending.

Very few authors can break our hearts soley by virtue of their prose style . . . Joyce, Fitzgerald, Nabokov come to mind. But perhaps even fewer -- at least in the past century -- can tell us stories that are worth remembering. Edmund Wilson, renowned literary critic and cultural gatekeeper who scoffed at Tolkien, has come and gone. But Frodo lives!