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specific events, as in historical fiction; however typical, as in the novel of manners; the plot of every novel, as a fusion of details into unity, is a unique product of imagi nation. The most commonplace and conventional novel ever written has at least this interest of distinct identity in imaginative process and result. The old-fashioned critical terms "invention" and "the fable" (see the glossary) emphasized this aspect of plot. The fact that plot is imaginative does not necessarily imply, however, that it is emotional or spontaneous. It is in the very process of conscious intellectual shaping of materials to an ideal result that some critics find the main dignity of plot. The novelist as well as the philosopher may call into action the "imaginative reason."

Adverse criticism

of plot rests largely upon a one-sided interpretation of its meaning. Zola's spirited attack has been abundantly answered, and particularly by the testimony of his own novels.1

44. Action and Narration. -Action is a general term which includes all the real or fictitious incidents of the ploc. It applies more particularly to external events, with definite time and place settings; but in a wider sense to emotions and thoughts, even without definite settings, which belong to the unity of illusion. Most novels contain many passages, especially the generalizations and descriptions by the author, which lie outside the action proper. The action includes all the incidents supposed to happen, whether distinctly given or merely implied; the narration gives some of these fully, some briefly, and omits all record of others. The relation of action to narration

1 For appreciation of plot, see, for example, Moulton's Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, and Santayana's Sense of Beauty; for adverse criticism, see Zola's Experimental Novel.

is in part analogous to that between the characters and characterization.

The life of Napoleon, or the events of the American Civil War, considered as materials for the biographer and historian, are actions ; the biography and the history are narrations. The action is clearly a larger and more complex whole than the narrative, to which it alone, in fiction or outside of fiction, gives reality and authority. This distinction applies to many topics in Chapter II, as well as in the present chapter. There is, for example, a situation in the action, and a situation in the narration. In Silas Marner, the action-situation at the close of Chapter IV includes the important incident of Dunstan Cass' death; but this incident enters the narrated situation only towards the close of the novel.

In the fluctuating relations of action and narration lie many of the problems of narrative technic. To imagine a story is one thing, to tell it another. The main relations may be called divergence (" foreshortening" when the narration distinctly condenses the action, and divergence in sequence, as in the example just given), convergence, and coincidence. Parallelism, that is, uniform proportion between action and narration, is practically impossible in a novel, and would at once destroy its artistic value. It is in the larger outlines of plot that divergence becomes most conspicuous and imperative. In details, the narration may approach the fulness of action, real or imagined, but from the scientific point of view there can never be actual coincidence. (Compare Section 31.) The process of selection necessary to fashion an artistic narrative from an action has been emphasized in recent rhetorical study. Some critics find in imaginative selection the primary method and principle of narrative art; and in a broader field, art in general has been defined as "the suppression of non-essentials."

45. Story. As a technical term, story may denote a larger whole of real action from which the plot is drawn. In clear form, story is rare except in historical fiction, but the plots of non-historical novels may always be viewed, by novelist or reader, as ideal episodes of a wider action historically real. The story of Ivanhoe is the history of the racial adjustment of Saxon and Celt in England; of Quo Vadis, the history of the struggle of early Christianity with paganism. The plot of The Scarlet Letter may be interpreted as an ideal episode in the story of the redemption of the sinner through love, in which the lives of St. Paul, St. Augustine, and many other saints, are historical episodes.

Various degrees of generalization by author or critic indicate proximate, intermediate, and ultimate stories. The proximate story of Kingsley's Alton Locke is the Chartist movement, the wider story, the general struggle of the laboring classes; the proximate story of Galdós' Doña Perfecta is the struggle of medieval ecclesiasticism with modernism in nineteenth century Spain, the wider story, the general history of the clash of religious authority with the liberated intellect. In the introduction of 1831 to The Fortunes of Nigel, Scott suggests, by generalization, a far wider story than the history of the reign of James II: "The most picturesque period of history is that when the ancient rough and wild manners of a barbarous age are just becoming innovated upon, and contrasted, by the illumination of increased or revived learning, and the instructions of renewed or reformed religion."

Unless there is a distinct and noteworthy narrative outline in the story itself, it is usually more satisfactory to consider it merely as background, or as general subject.

46. Story and Plot. When the story is distinctly conceived, it may have its own "dramatic line," with which the plot of the novel may coincide in beginning, climax, or catastrophe. The plot of The Plague Year is emphatically historical in that its beginning, rise, climax, fall, and

catastrophe coincide with those of the actual movement of the pestilence. (Compare Cross, pp. 143, 145, and passim.) Such coincidence is by no means an invariable rule in historical fiction. Both the climax and the catastrophe of Ivanhoe are in the main purely imaginary, though typically historical. Great historical events, like great historical characters, if introduced at all, may sink into the background of the novel.

Several plots may of course be drawn from the same story. These may be quite independent episodes; as Galdós' Doña Perfecta, Reade's Cloister and the Hearth, Ebers' Homo Sum, for example, which may all be viewed as episodes in the story of the conflict of ascetic Christianity with the secular nature of man. When several plots from the same story have a considerable number of common characters or incidents, they constitute what is technically a "cycle"; of which famous examples in romance are the Arthurian and Charlemagne cycles of the Middle Ages.

Story often undergoes considerable modification in details or in general interpretation before the novelist moulds his plot from it. The freedom of Scott in this respect is partly recorded in his introductory matter, and has been abundantly noticed. In details, he transforms a Catholic into a Protestant, and changes the chronological sequence in order to gain increased dramatic effect; in general interpretation, his emphasis upon contrast in certain specific periods is probably due as much to his own imagination as to actual historical conditions.

47. The Plot Proper. The plot proper of a novel is the design which unifies all the incidents of the narration, in their relation to one another, and to the action. Novelistic plot may generally be analyzed with profit by two methods, somewhat different, but so closely related that neither has much value without the other. The first

method considers plot as composed of single lines of interest, known in the action as "single actions," in the narration as "simple narratives." The second method subordinates these separate lines of interest to the general movement forward in chronological and causal series to a final goal-the catastrophe.

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48. The Single Action. A single action is a series of events having a unity and significance of its own if detached from the plot in which it is found. We may imagine it alone - frequently as the material for a short story or transferred to another novelistic plot, without loss of essential meaning; just as we may detach single characters from the network in which they are found, without loss of identity. Kipling's phrase, "but that's another story," technically stated, means, "a single. action too independent to be woven into the present plot."

Flexibility of plot analysis (Section 42) is particularly apparent in the perception of single actions. Some of these actions are dim, others quite distinct. They may have primarily a mere chronological unity, or may have their individual dramatic line, dramatis personæ, settings, theme, tone, etc. It is not necessary that they have an independent origin, or were conceived as distinct by the novel. ist, though these conditions of course emphasize their individuality. The single action should not be understood as primarily the history of a single character, though the two may sometimes be identical. Often it is rather the related history of two or more characters; sometimes a narrative movement in which the characters are merely the necessary agents of the action. The perception of single actions is often aided by a generalized statement of them.

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