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• W4313787295 abstract "Against Plot Kathryn Hamilton Warren (bio) The other day, a student asked if I wrote fiction. I told her I didn't, that I hadn't since the sixth grade, and that plot was what kept me from it. As a writer, and even as a reader, these days, I'm drawn to the image, the fragment, the idea—not to what happens next. Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy has been widely described as radical in its sidelining of the protagonist, the way it limns her selfhood in relief, through conversation. Less often noted is that the trilogy is a critique of narrative, both in terms of form—the novels eschew conventional plotting—and philosophy. One of the characters observes that the story of improvement … has commandeered our deepest sense of reality. It has even infected the novel, though perhaps now the novel is infecting us back again, so that we expect of our lives what we've come to expect of our books; but this sense of life as a progression is something I want no more of. This insight is a preoccupation as old as the novel itself. But where novels of the past worried that avid readers might fail to distinguish fiction from reality (Don Quixote), misread the real world because they expect it to match the fiction in their minds (Northanger Abbey), or grow discontent with their lot because it falls short of literary romance (Madame Bovary), Cusk goes further, inviting us to wonder whether the problem isn't with what plots consist of, but with the propulsive energy of plot itself. In the professional, middle-class circles I run in, life gets plotted along a clear arc of progression. Even those who rebel against it, or cannot obtain it, know how the story goes. A child attends school and excels, or such is the hope. The young adult attends college, perhaps taking a year or two off somewhere in there, but still. College leads to a career, even if circuitously, perhaps after graduate school, or travel. Somewhere along the line comes marriage, or partnership. Children, perhaps. Buying a house might fit in there for many, along with professional achievement of some kind. That is how my life has gone. I am privileged, my personal and professional pursuits underwritten by loving parents and their gifts of linguistic, cultural, and actual capital. Driven by desires whose conventionality sometimes pains me, I've progressed through the ordinary milestones of the middle-class plot without much fuss or struggle, and not always as a result of my own efforts. I have arrived, as they say. Now what? [End Page 167] The characters in Outline, when confronted with the stasis that descends after having ticked so many boxes, look around for the next step in the plot of their lives, and, for these characters, that step is divorce. Not, the novel makes clear, because of some deep incompatibility, misery, or abuse, but because the couples see divorce and the new journey it initiates as another opportunity for progress. Rupture begets transformation: a plot is born. Looking around at myself and the other 30- and 40-somethings who populate my leafy neighborhood, I don't see a lot of divorce, but other signs of restlessness abound. I see a lot of remodeling. I see a lot of vacation planning. I see obsession with Orange Theory, or Keto, or microdosing, all potential paths to a new self or a new revelation. Chatting at the playground with a few mothers I like and know to be, in most realms of their lives, heeders of science, I learned that all three had visited a psychic in the last month, longing to know what life had in store for them—and believing she could tell them. What happens next? A year or two ago, mulling over the choice of whether to adopt a fourth child with me, my next-door neighbor paused mid-thought to say that, unlike her, my husband and I seemed to be happy with the way things are. Though I suspect she finds us dull, I took the comment as a compliment, liking to think myself so enlightened as to..." @default.
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• W4313787295 date "2022-09-01" @default.
• W4313787295 modified "2023-10-17" @default.
• W4313787295 title "Against Plot" @default.
• W4313787295 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2022.0125" @default.
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