The Critique of Plotless Novels
A few months earlier on X, a reader vituperated A Moment of True Feeling by 2019 Nobel prize winner Peter Handke. The book, he argued, was insufferable, at best the rambling of a middle-aged European man with a hollow life. At the core of his pithy review glimmered a fierce opposition towards its lack of plot, for the character, he said, roved the streets wasting his time and, if anything, drinking coffee; being plotless, the book provided but boredom.
The book is indeed plotless. An Austrian diplomat wanders for two days the streets of Paris casting intent looks at the universe of things: the river, the squares, a landscape of sky with a tree, a long incursion through which he experiences a string of puzzlement, anger, disgust, elation. He has also set off in search of events, hoping for something to occur to him. His life is indeed hollow, and beyond a passing infidelity, unexpected and hopeless, his life suffers no alteration. His is the uneventful biography of a fern: wind runs past him, a black beetle topples on his side, the leaves stir as if “seething” about him.
The Poetic Mind at Work
Instead, it is his mind at work, its unorthodox associations, its poetic edge, that fills the pages of the book: the stimuli of a world that to his eyes becomes the more ambiguous and sensitive the more he bores through its spaces (or rather its vantage points: rooms and benches at ground level are towers from which one is allowed to crane at the stretches of human action.)
If one takes a loose approach to the notion of events, these—from the transitions of the wind through the world contemplation on a bench to the abrupt philandering—might as well be named as such, and in their coherent mass constitute a plot. Then, Handke’s novel must be plotless to our X reader because none of these events seems to bring into play an element that has been deemed vital in the architecture of fiction—namely, conflict. When the diplomat enters a coffee shop, at his exit no true actions seem to have modified neither the course of his fate nor the scene, and a reader might have the feeling that the book would suffer little from its deletion; once at home, the greatest event is the painful and deadened cough of an unknown child across his room’s wall; when he pushes afoot through vast grass plots he is not harried by animals or by some landlord, but instead owns the space and has time for reflection. No struggle between external events weighs on the diplomat, and no apparent classic tension awaits to be untangled. The reader deals with a wanderer (as he does as well in Handke’s Short Letter, Long Farewell, Afternoon of a Writer and even The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) and the expression of his poetic mind at a spell of existential inflection (the “hollowness” the reader pointed out). And that is the extent of it.
Expanding the Notion of Conflict
Yet to my mind, this is a compelling book where, as in the bulk of Handke’s oeuvre, the notion of plot is not reverted or suppressed or spurned, but rather stretched, an ingenious feat that follows an ancient and renowned strain of literary experimentation.
The series of unlinked events that I have just enlisted are stitched together, not by the urges of biography (as they are, for instance, in A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul), but by the functions of the mind: mostly by the sight, unsatisfied, whirling, sensitive, and magnanimously baffled by the mystery of life and living. If we are to apply the notion of conflict to the book it is in that sight that conflict springs and thrives, turned towards the complicated beauty of things, content in the deviations of alienation and disagreement. In the vast grass plots the diplomat is not harried by animals or by some landlord but by the whims of the mind; when he exits the coffee shop his body and the world might seem intact, but his mind and the things it has touched through meditation have been tampered with. The encounter of opposite forces, which is by all means the most elementary definition of “conflict,” takes place in the eye, an eye that after all represents, other than the optical sphere through which enters the creation, the system of the senses themselves: the stimuli of the ear and the touch and the self-awareness. It is this eye that warps and recasts the shape of objects abstract and mundane (which is at once the definition of imagination, the main tool of literature.) An eye that bends the world and registers the strange motions of standing things is an eye that crawls with poetry (and poetry is a shock, a thunder), and an eye that might even turn against itself and reconsider, after great pangs and unrelenting reticence, the ideas and habits that have hitherto served it well, and seek for new sources of animation. If this does not amount to conflict, even in the classic dramatic sense, then a centuries-old lineage of scholars has been earning a salary and a good suntan every summer on mistaken notions.
The Epic in the Everyday
While in Shakespeare’s King Lear (to mention a paragon of classical conflict and tension) a handful of particular dramas collide into one public ending, in Handke’s A Moment of True Feeling the collision occurs in a private sphere, holding nonetheless the marks of drama and epic that are to be found in King Lear as well. A shift in the gaze of Handke’s character holds as much a transformation as the moment when Edgar clothes himself in the tatters of a beggar to live up to his promise of protecting his father; it holds as much strain and rupture as any of Lear’s soliloquies in his ramblings through the wastelands (which are also the wastelands of his decrepit mind: the world is after all his skull, as it is for the diplomat.) As Handke himself has declared in his lengthy interview with Peter Hamm, Long Live Illusions, his books are rooted and devoted to the epic, written in the tradition of Homer and Cervantes and Goethe. And the epic, however adventurous and full of circumstance it might appear in the popular culture, can too occur in the infinite spaces of a skull. An event in literature can also be a non-event.
The Literary Tradition of Plotless Novels
This nuance, extension and reformulation of the epic conception is not, however, Handke’s feat alone. Before him came Beckett and Joyce and Kafka; before them, Sterne and Diderot. In between came Clarice Lispector. Born in Brazil to Ukrainian parents, Lispector was never an easy read, never a pleaser of diaphane plots and resolutions. The 170-odd pages of The Passion According to G. H., a work from 1964, issue from the domestic encounter of a sculptress with a cockroach. An inferior event, but unimportant origins are bound here to astounding consequences.
The first chapter, and the main stream of the rest of the book, consists of a series of metaphysical and intimate conjectures and illuminations, at this spot on the need of creating a form able to contain her say, to arrange the world, to serve as a modest guide, while her personality is crumbling apart and in perpetual reshaping. At some point, the sculptress, to ease herself from the strain of writing, of starting to write, proposes herself to address her writing to an imaginary being. What comes next is a taste of the book’s tone (the translation is Ronald W. Sousa’s, 1988): “But I’m afraid to start writing to be understood by that imaginary someone, I’m afraid I’ll start ‘making’ a sense, with the same meek madness that up to yesterday was my ‘healthy’ way of fitting into a system.” Then: “Mine was the courage of the sleepwalker who simply acts. During those hours of perdition, I had the courage neither to compose nor to organize. And especially the courage not to look ahead.” And further on: “I am the priestess of a secret that I no longer know. And I serve out of blissful ignorance.”
Style Over Plot
Like Handke’s, Lispector’s book tends to the probe of the mind and its conflagrations rather than to the assortment of external circumstances along a line of progress (an arch, as they call it in script class), tension or conflict, and resolution (or lack of it.) Conflict and struggle abound both in the fields of the mind, and it is its transformations and convolutions that make the story; it is as if each paragraph were in itself a tension and a line of progress and a resolution (or lack of it), with such unity and verbal grandeur as to make them stories by themselves. In Lispector’s work, however, it takes a form further rarefied than in Handke’s, with its back turned against whatever a reader might expect from a book of fiction, a form often so extreme that it can only find its parallel in Beckett’s Malone Dies (1951), the soliloquy of a man in the throes of death, or even The Unnamable (1953), where even the nature of the narrator, the I that plays the column of the sentence, is at odds (as André Gide, who was unwilling to resort for his longer stories to the category “roman,” “novel,” and replaced it for “soties” or simply “récits,” Lispector seems uneasy at the use of this denomination; both cases, however, fetched up reaffirming the empire of the novel by shedding light on its uncharted stretches.) Lispector proves (or rather speculates, since proving is too reasonable an aim for such an uncertain story) that it is the hand of the writer that makes the story, the style that makes the birth of a story possible, that hews the story from the intuitive lumps of the mind, rather than a set of strictly arranged circumstances and psychologies.
The Interplay of Style and Circumstance
Lispector’s defense of style (her non-style) over plot does not snub or aspire to annihilate those books full of circumstance and plot-turns, like The Invisible Man, Kim, Wuthering Heights or Don Quixote (one of whose action sequences is perhaps the most celebrated in literature and popular culture: Don Quixote galloping with his rust-freckled spear against the windmills), books that have become paragons generation after generation; Lispector’s defense of style reminds one instead that it is the style—the form and song of their sentences and the multitude of structural and minute decisions over lexicon and tone—that has honored the spirit of those stories and led them to their pinnacles.
The Question of Difference
However, if plotless novels are an “alternative” species of novel or a search for fresh paths, as this text seems to have discovered, why do their characters’ fate and conflicts resemble so closely those of other characters in far more classical novels? Is not the frenzy of reflection and self-examination and puzzlement in which the sculptress falls at the encounter of the cockroach quite like the one that experiences Tess in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles when she finds herself among strangers in a new village with an unwanted child? Are plotless novels indeed that different from plotful novels if their characters tend to suffer similar effects, if the focus is set on the transgressions and transformations of the being by inner and external forces?
The Nature of the Novel
In Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama (1956, translated into English by Esther Allen), a novel about the unsatisfied expectancy of a man who hopes to be promoted in the viceroyalty bureaucracy, nothing happens other than the more or less trivial circumstances of the long waiting, and it is the style, slow-paced, metaphorical, meditative, sometimes archaic, often strange but enticing in its syntax, that drags the story onwards, as in Lispector’s case. While he waits for a ship at the port, Zama stares at a dead monkey entangled to the stilts in the waters, which fires up a reflection on his fortune, his being stuck in an element that wafts greyly into nowhere. Between his reflection (and reflection means at this point illumination and deformation) and the external event or image (the monkey among the stilts) there is a dependence, a coexistence, a symbiotic link which gives birth to the story and its poetry. Perhaps the nature of a novel is rather simpler: it is the collision between the world’s turning and the character’s spirit. If poetry is a thunder that strikes, a novel is the fire spreading on the field.
