Funny things about how you started to read novels

more detail another time possibly, this is kind of an unanalytic take on it.

I'm not sure I'd entirely agree with this, but: It seems like a book would have to have less of a focus on "plot" or "character" than real life for it to be worth "escaping" into.

"Useful" literary qualities?

"never really saw plot as a "literary" thing for a long time, just a genre-hack device" : kind of odd. i've been reading dashiell hammett this week, i enjoy red harvest a whole lot for how uh subversive (bad word) its plot is of genre conventions - whereas with the dain curse and the maltese falcon i find it less hard to care about whatever mystery is being solved .. genre readers read plots partly as uh conversation, as play with the idea of the last genre novel plot. and literary readers do too, i think, think about richardon's pamela, and the dozens of sendups and ripoffs of it, and clarissa as response to them, and then fielding going more 'serious' after that ..

which is a way of reading plots as something other than a vehicle for closure, mebbe.

lots of people do have lives at novel levels, as long as it is the sort of novel that is about e.g. londoners who know some asian people, and not the sort of novel that is about how no puudly would be safe until Earth was wiped clean of life!

I think some readers look at mystery plots in conversation as you describe but I'm not sure most of them do. A lot of mystery readers seem to enjoy the interchangeability of the novels, how they are pleasant to read but not overwhelming or even memorable. (See also "ambient poetry".)

there might be a gaping hole in said analogy. i'm tempted to extend it: to say that presence of this sort of dialogue tends to open up spaces for the other sort of dialogue. also i think it might be a case of over-caricaturing mystery readers, that these two kinds of conversation are (like their analogs!) not always so easy to keep separate.

anyway this thread is not just supposed to be about plot, but the odd things it took you far longer to cotten to than you suspect it took others.

i am still having difficulty conceding that real life is plotted, at all.

I guess I would ask how it is that real life, which after all consists of events that tumble into one another and seem to affect one another, isn't plotted, and wonder whether you'd answer "because it almost never resolves meaningfully", or not.

now there ARE a number of things going on in life that are clearly ordered, even sometimes narrative: people's understandings of themselves, their progress toward closer and more distant goals, national myths, theories of crimes in criminal investigations, whatever. but any of those seem to me to be about as ordered as in fiction; in many cases less so because even the especially self-concerned do not have especially rivetingly plotted lives. (some do; and then maybe the plots of their lives, perhaps as told by them, resemble those of novels.)

(i wonder (knowing that sterl is reading) whether historians often talk about 'plot' when they write history, and what they think about the relation between the plot of a work of history, and the corresponding sequence of actual events (does it follow that plot? have a plot?). i would think that they would be somewhat hesitant to commit to saying the actual history had a plot because that would involve a decision about the causally significant things in history (so there may be many long-agreed-upon ways of telling stories about the past at different levels of detail, focusing on different agents and different kinds of cause, but that agreement is only sort of for lack of a 'proper' grounding).)

(was namechecked in i think a work on philosophical style? as working out similar problems in historiography and history etc.)

OK, but keep in mind that it's not the life that's important, it's the conceptualization of the life. How you present your life to others and to yourself. Perhaps you've never gotten one of those holiday "Another Year for the McFelsterson Family" newsletters, or perhaps you've never heard someone tell their life story at a bar. People use plot to organize and give meanings to their life. And if it's not as compelling as a novel, it's because they're not as good at it as a good novelist would be.

Or, say, a good 18th century historian. I am generally agreeing with the sort of doubts expressed in that article about glomming plot onto history, but at the same time sometimes I feel like it's making a big to-do about the obvious -- like going up to the translators of the King James Bible and saying to them, "But Jesus didn't speak in English! Nowhere does this book acknowledge that!" Yes, but so what? That's not the point. I'm not convinced that a plot-oriented representation of history is a more problematic way of representing the past than any other method you care to mention -- except inasmuch as plotting doesn't really do much for me, so it comes off as fakey or disengaging!

Or their lives are kinda boring, right?