28Q
PARTISAN REVIEW
them "as benevolently as though they were somebody else's, not
his."
A simple action
is
made into pure fun, and at the same time the
false goodness of Pecksniff
is
revealed.
The roof of Dickens' cave hangs on a strong ribbing of plot,
and here again he shows
his
invention in a gothic ingenuity. It might
be
argued that all novels have a plot, but surely
Anna Karenina,
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Madame Bovary,
have a kind of narrative
structure that differentiates them from
Bleak House, Our Mutual
Friend,
or
Great Expectations.
The authors of the first group apply
their
art
to producing an air of naturalness, almost of biography. The
"story" of their books given an over-all social and geographical
envi–
ronment, grows out of the nature of their characters. The complexities
are those of psychological interrelations; and although there may
be
a
wealth of naturalistic incident, there
is
a minimum of the old
wills,
concealed identities, and dramatic coincidence dear to Dickens. Such
novels have the cadence of veracity. At their best, they have no more
plot than a true account of human lives--which
is
no plot at
all,
compared to the abstract pattern of Cinderella, the Oedipus myth,
Bleak House.
Except for its survival in certain detective novels, the large
interwoven design (manipulated, artificial, if you like) has gone
out of fashion with its calculated tangles and calculated unravelings.
Perhaps, leaving aside the out-and-out folk tale, its inherent draw–
backs can be overcome only by such master novelists as Dumas,
Balzac, Dickens. But it is comfortable to begin a "plot novel," to
feel its bulk in the hand, and to know that all those pages to come
will be ordered with a felicity and ingenuity beyond the accidents
of actual life, just as it is a satisfaction to hear the opening themes
of a Haydn sonata and know in advance that they are going to
be
worked out according to a beautiful law and will come to an end
at the precise moment when the sonata form
is
satisfied. For a plot
does not depend primarily on surprise and suspense; it depends on
completeness of resolution. The successful plot novel, like an ingenious
fairy tale, can be re-read without loss of interest, and we come again
to the ritual triumph of hero and heroine over the opposing (or evil)
forces with the same sense of moral order. Indeed we often may
guess, before we are halfway through our first reading, the main
resolution of the plot, because such and such a denouement
is
pre-
