UC Berkeley

The Secret Lives of Plot is a study of the “plotter,” a seemingly peripheral but in fact necessary figure within the nineteenth-century novel and twentieth-century narrative cinema. A creature of ressentiment, melancholy, and political insufficiency, the plotter, although often cast as a minor or merely functional foil to a narrative’s more respectable cast of characters, nonetheless exerts a fascination at the levels of both narrative content and narrative form. The narratives I look at indeed rely on “low” moments of self-interested plotting—Frank Churchill’s flirting, Lady Audley’s bigamy, Miss Havisham’s revenge—in order to move their own plots forward, while also rooting for the failure of exactly the characters on whom they rely. What results is a strange and sometimes hypocritical entanglement between traditional narrative form and the frustrated desires of the arriviste, the social climber, the parasite, or the conspirator. If, as I argue, particular social and class distinctions persist as a set of formal problems embedded in the relationship between plot, literary character, and narration’s hierarchical structures of power, the plotter is one site at which social anxiety becomes narrative form. Often seen as the least complicated aspects of narrative form, plots and plotting emerge as points at which social anxiety is expressed in and informs the very logic of what we might call the novelistic. At its broadest level, my project addresses ways in which the plotter’s base and insatiable desire for the “mastery of form” that Pierre Bourdieu places at the crux of cultural refinement allows us to understand traditional narrative’s own self-consciousness about both its own aspirations toward aesthetic prestige and its fantasy of capturing a reality that remains always out of reach.