(2019-09-19) Mark Bernstein Plot

Mark Bernstein: Plot I think that Michael Joyce — an MFA-wielding disciple of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop — was reacting against a different and more substantial opponent, the Victorian sentimental novel. “Sentimental” in this context has a precise, technical meaning: it refers to art that tries to teach us how we ought to feel. This was a great project of the 19th century: think Dickens and Trollope and Victor Hugo: the purpose of the plot was to show you how a good person ought to think about the world. Modernism saw this use of plot as a chump’s game.

In writing, the reaction against the sentimental novel is called Modernism. People devised different ways to avoid dishonest sentiment. You could try to speak to the unconscious: Brecht and Gertrude Stein and sometimes James Joyce. You could strive to speak directly and truly, about things everyone knows and in language everyone uses: Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner and Lawrence. You could speak to the concerns of people who don’t generally show up in literature and who have no reason to lie: Huck Finn, Carrie Meeber, Proust’s Narrator, or the speakers in Frost’s early dramatic poems like “Death Of The Hired Hand”. You could avoid plot altogether, or turn plot on its head, or subvert your own plots.