Raphaël BARONI PLOTS IN LIFE AND FICTION: A COGNITIVE RECONCEPTUALIZATION1 raphael.baroni@unil.ch University of Lausanne, Lausanne N1 I �ind a curious consensus on one rather important matter. It concerns, broadly speaking, the relationship between narrative and the real world. Simply put, it is the view that real events do not have the character of those we �ind in stories, and if we treat them as if they did have such character, we are not being true to them. David Carr (1986: 301) Most deprecations of plot are based on the claim that life does not provide plots, and literature should be like life. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983: 56-57) Keywords: plot, emplotment, mimesis, cognitivism, narratology, naturality This article aims to discuss the de�inition of plot, a central but also one of the most elusive concepts in narrative theory. Our de�inition will stress the reconceptualization of plot in contemporary narratology, especially in rhetorical and cognitivist models. In these models, the plot is seen as an unstable matrix of virtualities, and therefore, auctorial planning and retrospection only play a marginal role in its intentionality and even in its form. Based on this, the question of the existence of “natural plots”, namely those we �ind in life experiences before their con�iguration in a retrospective narrative, will be investigated, with serialized information in daily newspapers serving as a case study. This question is not only important for the philosophy of history, or re�lections concerning the �idelity of factual narratives, but also for determining the aesthetical value of “intriguing” �iction and for any re�lection concerning the mimetic status of narrative representations of life. Introduction This article aims to discuss the de�inition of plot, a central but also one of the most elusive concepts in narrative theory. Our de�inition will stress the reconceptualization of plot in contemporary narratology, es- 1 I express my gratitude to Marie-Laure Ryan and David Herman for having read and discussed this essay and for helping me to improve it, even though I remain entirely responsible for the points of view expressed in those lines. Библид 0350-6428, 47 (2015) 155, стр. 41-56. / оригиналан научни рад УДК 82.0 pecially in rhetorical and cognitivist models. Based on this, the question of the existence of “natural plots”, namely those we �ind in life experiences before their con�iguration in a retrospective narrative, will be investigated, with serialized information in daily newspapers as a case study. This question is not only important for the philosophy of history, or re�lections concerning the �idelity of factual narratives, but also for determining the aesthetical value of “intriguing” �iction and for any re�lection concerning the mimetic status of narrative representations of life. An Elusive Concept with Many De�initions Thinking and writing about a concept like “plot” in a foreign language is a challenge, but also a very instructive activity. It helps to prevent a rei�ication of the object by showing how different languages have different semantic traditions and alternative networks of signi�ications for related concepts. For example, how will you translate the “point” of a story or its “tellability” in French? And why do “intrigue” and “plot” have such different etymologies when they’re supposed to be referring to the same concept? And how is it possible that the English translators of Tomashevsky’s famous essay have chosen plot as an equivalent of the Russian’s word sjužet, while in the French translation by Todorov, “intrigue” is clearly distinct from both fabula and sjužet? As stated by Hilary Dannenberg in the recent Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory: Despite its apparent simplicity of reference, plot is one of the most elusive terms in narrative theory. Narrative theorists have used the term to refer to a variety of different phenomena. Many key de�initions of narrative hinge on the aspect of temporal sequentiality, and the repeated attempts to rede�ine the parameters of plot re�lect both the centrality and the complexity of the temporal dimension of narrative. (2005: 435) H. Porter Abbott makes the same account, adding that plot “is an even slipperier term than narration, both more polyvalent and more approximate in its meanings, indeed so ’vague in ordinary usage‘ that narratologists often avoid it altogether” (2007: 43). He points out at least three different meanings for the term: 1) the plot is “a skeletal story, either universal or culturally fabricated”, something that can be narrowed to the narratological concepts of “fabula” or “story”; 2) the plot is “a combination of economy and sequencing of events that makes a story a story and not just raw material”, transforming it in an “intelligible whole”; 3) the plot, like the formalist concept of “sjužet”, refers to the way a story departs “from the chronological order of its events”. To avoid the problems related to this polysemy, Abbott recommends: “If the �irst of these uses comes closest to the way in which we use the term in English, the second and third, with their emphasis on the art by which a story is delivered, might more accurately be referred to as ‘emplotment’” (2007: 44). But one might object that in his survey Abbott remains, in fact, very close to the formalist tradition by presenting “plot” as a “skeletal story”, corresponding to a fully formed fabula inscribed in the text, and 42 Raphaël BARONI Читање традиције 43 “emplotment” as operations of textualization, instead of focusing on the cognitive experience of the audience, or on the function of a textual device shaped by a teller in order to give birth to a speci�ic effect2. When Abbott writes that, in “common English usage”, in a statement like “it was boring; there was no plot” the word “plot” refers to the “story” or “fabula”, we could as well make the assumption that the disappointed audience refers more precisely to a lack of narrative interest of this story. Even the most boring story, like Andy Warhol eating a hamburger for example, can be described as sequences of actions, with a beginning, a middle and an end. This representation cannot be in�inite and even the action of someone eating something surely forms a whole, and can be linked to a cultural script. Additionally, the story material is organized in a speci�ic way, even if, in this case, the chronological order and the real-time duration of the act are strictly respected, in order to create a paradoxical defamiliarization of a banal course of events. So, what exactly is missing in these “narrations without a plot”, as natural languages identify them? Hilary Dannenberg states that there is at least one common point to all de�initions of plot: it is supposed to be a sequential aspect of narratives, even though there is no consensus when we have to decide on what narrative level this sequence is situated ( fabula or sjužet?) or even about the de�inition of what a “sequence” is (a totality? a dynamic form? a rhythm?). The structuralist legacy has trained scholars to associate the concept of “plot” with the structure of the events told (the fabula) independently from its progressive actualization by a reader. The word “plot”, here, refers to a retrospective schematization of the story logic grasped as a whole. But more recently, Peter Brooks has claimed that plot “seems […] to cut across the fabula/sjužet distinction in that to speak of plot is to consider both story elements and their ordering” (13). For Brooks, the plot is not simply a formal attribute of narratives, but it is a pole of attraction, an energy, or a force: Plot as we have de�ined it is the organizing line and intention of narrative, thus perhaps best conceived as an activity, a structuring opera- 2 For a more recent account of the polysemic uses of the concept, see Kukkonen who considers another de�inition of plot as the “progressive structuration” of story events “as readers perceive them” (2014: §4). tion elicited in the reader trying to make sense of those meanings that develop only through textual and temporal succession. Plot in this view belongs to the reader’s “competence,” and in his “performance”—the reading of narrative—it animates the sense-making process: it is a key component of that “passion of (for) meaning” that, Barthes says, lights us a�ire when we read. We can, then, conceive of the reading of plot as a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text. Narratives both tell of desire—typically present some story of desire—and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signi�ication. (1984: 37) So, the key for understanding what we mean in ordinary language when we talk about the difference between stories with or without a “plot” is not the level on which the sequence is situated, but its function in the interaction between a teller and his audience. Thus, psychoanalytical, rhetorical and/or cognitivist narratologists have adopted a more dynamic point of view on narrative sequence than their structuralist/ formalist predecessors3, because they have grounded their analysis on the progression of the interpreter and on the function of plotting devices. In this perspective, narrative sequence is no longer the structure of an already formed story, but an unstable and ever evolving con�iguration of events in the reader’s mind. So, for Brooks, “the study of narrative needs to move beyond the various formalist criticisms”, because formalism “cannot deal with the dynamics of texts as actualized in the reading process” (1984: 35–36). Emma Kafalenos, in her reinterpretation of the Proppian sequence, insists on this important shift: By assigning the construction of fabula to perceivers (including readers), I open the possibility not only of comparing individual perceivers’ fabulas but of directly addressing the instability of a fabula as it grows and changes during individual perceivers’ process of perception. (2006: 37) In my own model, I have centered my re�lections on narrative tension—a concept de�ined as the dynamic aspect of plot (see Baroni 2007; 2009)—, and I have proposed to consider the complication phase of a plot as a reluctant act of telling whose aim is to generate a network of virtual interpretations of the fabula in the audience until a possible (but not necessary) resolution4. Thus, if readers sometimes have the feeling they are grasping a fully formed con�iguration of the whole story, most of the time, fabula appears as an underdetermined structure, subject to many changes linked to virtual developments. As stated by Hilary Dannenberg: The reading of a narrative is fuelled by two different aspects of plot. First, there is the intranarrative con�iguration of events and characters, 3 Sternberg denies the existence of a postclassical narratology, arguing that rhetorical approaches of narrative phenomenon existed long before and during the structuralist period (see 2011). For an overview of the question of narrative sequence in contemporary narratology, see Baroni and Revaz (in press). 4 For a more complete description of this conception of plot, see Baroni (La Tension narrative, 2007 and L’Œuvre du temps, 2009). 44 Raphaël BARONI Читање традиције 45 which is an ontologically unstable matrix of possibilities created by plot in its still unresolved aspect. This in turn fuels the reader’s cognitive desire to be in possession of the second aspect of plot—the �inal con�iguration achieved at narrative closure when (the reader hopes) a coherent and de�initive constellation of events will have been achieved. (2008: 13) When considering the narrative strategy of an implied author, the art of emplotment could be described as a complex interplay between fabula and sjužet, designed to puzzle the audience, to arouse suspense, curiosity, or surprise in the aesthetic experience. Thus, emplotment would correspond to a hermeneutic tension based on an indeterminacy of the fabula until a possible resolution brings closure (or intentionally fails to do so) to the uncertain progression of the reader toward a “�inal con�iguration”. Some narratologists hesitate to consider narratives dynamics as direct aspects of plot—for example, Phelan prefers to oppose plot to progression—, while others—like Brooks, Dannenberg, or myself—are convinced that: An analysis of narrative’s story tells us very little about the true dynamics of plot and about the fascination of �ictional worlds for the reader; this stems from the fact that narrative does not simply tell one story, but weaves a rich, ontologically multidimensional fabric of alternate possible worlds. (Dannenberg 2004: 160). Johanne Villeneuve5 has shown that French language offers some interesting derivations linked to the root “intrigue”, supporting the idea that the phenomenon associated to plot might be a process involving an intriguing teller (un narrateur intriguant) addressing an intrigued audience (un public intrigué). Therefore, the function of plot could be, before anything else, to intrigue (intriguer), in other words a discursive strategy aiming to give a puzzling representation of a story instead of con�iguring its meaning. To avoid the rei�ication of a narrative device whose “raison d’être” is to give birth to a vivid experience of time, it might be useful to remember that the verb “intriguer” is at least as important as the substantive “intrigue”, and therefore, the plot is a process and not an object. According to Villeneuve: To address the paradigm of plot, we should turn not to the metaphor of the room, but to that of the forest as it appears to those who get lost in it: a labyrinth with paths intertwined, a prison open on an in�inite sky, streaked with branches and multiple paths. In the middle of the forest, the story is no longer an object the researcher contemplates from a distance or the celebrated triumph of Aristotelian concordance over Augus- 5 “Loin d’entraver la richesse sémantique des intrigues, la conception du problème en termes de sens permet de désubstanti�ier la notion d’intrigue, de la livrer, sur un mode interrogatif, aux méandres d’une poétique. Elle permet d’en rappeler la valeur intuitive de même que la sensibilité inhérente à son appréciation. Elle marque, de manière plus évidente que ne le ferait un concept narratologique, son incidence affective et perceptive. Le lecteur se sent happé par elle. Dans l’expectative, il se sent intrigué. Il pressent que quelque chose se trame ; il se tourne déjà vers l’imagination des possibles. L’intrigue, en tant que chose sentie, pressentie, rend inutile tout recours à l’essentialisme.” (Villeneuve 2003 : xvi). tinian discordance. In the midst of plots, the story leaves something still going: breath, wind, and rumor. The meaning of plot determines these circuits on which narrative imagination runs. (2003: 53, m.t.) To sum up, we could de�ine two major kinds of plot, which differ fundamentally according to the direction of the time perspectives they open for the audience. In the �irst case, we can have a more or less chronological and unambiguous narration whose interest relies primarily on the obscurity of the future. In this case, the sequence induces suspense by unfolding actions whose outcome matters and whose development remains uncertain. In the second case, the action is represented in a puzzled way in order to arouse the curiosity. In this case, attention is oriented toward the past or the present of mysterious events whose gaps are still to be �illed. Resolution, if it occurs, functions as a potentially surprising answer to the questions raised by the complication. As stated by Todorov: We realize here that two different kinds of interest exist. The �irst can be called curiosity; it works from effects to causes: starting from a certain effect (a corpse and some clues) we must �ind its cause (the culprit and what drove him to the crime). The second form is suspense and it works from causes to effects: �irst we are introduced to the causes, initial data (some gangsters who prepare mischief), and our interest is elicited by the expectation of what will happen, in other words, the effects (corpses, crimes, clashes). (Todorov 1971 [1967]: 60, m.t.) This quotation shows that structuralists did not always ignore narrative dynamics, but it is obvious that their cognitive models were mostly reduced to “codes”, while virtualities sketched by the readers during their progression through the text seemed less important than those actions that actually belong to the text6. Also, emotions induced by narratives were mostly reduced to effects produced by popular culture: in this case, Todorov uses the distinction between curiosity and suspense to build a typology opposing hardboiled novels to detective stories. We know that, at least in modern aesthetics, the art of emplotment and emotions aroused by plots have often been opposed to literariness. But if we accept Ricœur’s idea that narrative �ictions are essentially meant to deal with the serious question of time, then why criticize them when temporal perspectives are dramatized by inducing an interest in the audience for past, present or future aspects of fabula? In real life too, there are experiences without passion, moments when we are entangled in our daily routine and we don’t worry about past or future, but then, not only we do not have anything to tell, but time itself seems to vanish, we live in some kind of eternal and boring repetition of the present. So we can postulate that emotions such as suspense, curiosity or surprise are experienced not only in puzzling �ictions, but are also a fundamental ingredient of real experiences, and that these emotions are true symptoms 6 On that point, the model of Claude Bremond is more open to virtualities, even though it has not evolved to a full description of narrative dynamics. The breaking point is more obvious in the book by Umberto Eco The Role of the reader. 46 Raphaël BARONI Читање традиције 47 of something happening, that we are in the presence of an eventfulness that has the power to open the gates of time and transform a mere happening into something tellable7. For a storyteller, plot building consists primarily of postponing the resolution of a puzzling or uncertain story. By doing so, the narrator aims to imitate for his audience the natural experience of those unresolved events that have the power to arouse our attention in real life. This unresolved nature of events drives our intention toward the obscurity of the past, present or future, and it encourages us to elaborate prognostics or diagnostics8 in order to anticipate a resolution that is still to come. The passions aroused by �ictions may appear therefore as a catharsis, because they preserve the force and some cognitive attributes of direct experiences of time, but the connotation of the original experience is reversed in the aesthetic experience, because the unpleasant feeling that affects the subject by threatening his actions or his comprehension of the world becomes a source of pleasure, or a simulation where new cultural frames can be challenged. The Orientation of Plot I come now to a central issue that derives directly form this reconceptualization of plot. An old question can be reformulated in a new context: is plot a feature of life itself, or is it only a narrative strategy, a symbolic mediation, which could be considered as a transformation or a deformation of mere reality? In other words, and to widen the re�lection of Bergson about laughter, is the plot “something mechanical encrusted upon the living”? We �ind in La Nausée a statement shared by many narratologists: This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell. […] Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. (1964: 56) Several historians have supported this view, mainly Hayden White and Louis O. Mink, for whom plots were cultural frames, common to factual and �ictional narratives, adding retrospectively some features to past events, transforming the episodic nature of something happening into some intelligible whole. As stated by Mink: “Stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends; there are meetings, but the start of an affair belongs to the story we tell ourselves later” (1970: 557). Frank Kermode holds the same view when he writes: 7 On the relations between “eventfulness” and “tellability”, see the article of Peter Hühn, “Functions and Forms of Eventfulness in Narrative Fiction” (2008) and Baroni (“tellanbility”, 2009) 8 For more details on this terminology, see Baroni (2007). Men, like poets, rush ‘into the middest,’ in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need �ictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and poems. (1977: 7) This position seems to be shared also by Paul Ricœur, if we consider the distinction he introduced, in the �irst volume of Time and Narrative, between pre�iguration, con�iguration, and re�iguration9, which seems to imply that, even if tales are an inevitable dimension of life, it is, at least partly, a �ictional one. According to him, we could �ind different stages in the process of “emplotting”, from the event itself, as it is experienced before its emplotment, to its recon�iguration by the mediation of a story crafted afterward. But is it true? Is life, when we experience it directly, a pure continuum without beginnings, middles and ends? And does the discontinuity of beginning, middle and end rely necessarily on a retrospective glance on the events? Do we really have to wait for the end of our actions to see the merging of their beginnings, middles and ends, and to know what is related to them and what is not? Do we really need retrospection to give sense to what happens now and to craft the plot of a meaningful story? There are several ways to criticize the common assumption that narrative is necessarily a mediated experience, a con�iguration apart from life itself in its so-called nudity or immediacy. If we consider our daily experiences, we know that the suspense or the curiosity aroused by an event that is still un�inished has the potential to lead to a conclusion (a moment when the tension can be resolved), so an emerging sequence already has a form and a meaning for us. Even more: the sequence of the event relies directly on the suspense or the curiosity that opened a breach in the �low of time, interrupted the continuum and oriented my attention toward an uncertain resolution. And the tension I’m experiencing right now might only be the affect I need to care about what happens, to have the feeling that I’m responsible for something meaningful that might become, some day, something worth telling, that is already a story worth living. Even if, afterwards, we discover that some cues were leading to a dead-end, the simple fact that it represented, at some point, a virtuality in our storyworld makes them meaningful for the plot. Many philosophers have claimed that the experience of time is essentially narrative, at least in the mental representation we can have of it. Husserl and Heidegger, among others, have explored the connections between time and being, showing that the structure of intentionality necessarily shapes time perspectives in the actuality of consciousness. Wilhelm Schapp, in the same phenomenological vein, has grounded his ontology in narratives by stating that the being of things or humans is necessarily “tangled up in stories” that emerge in the heart of the most passive experience. More recently, David Carr has argued in favor of continuity between experience and narration, stating that the retrospective narrations of historians are not a distortion of “reality” but rather an 9 For a critic of the three mimesis, see (Baroni, L’Œuvre du temps 2009: 45–94). 48 Raphaël BARONI Читање традиције 49 ampli�ication of it. In his view, narration is not some kind of “cloth that covers bare reality”; instead it is the form of the “more authentic experience unfolding in time” (1986: 61). For David Carr, “narration is not only a mode of discourse but more essentially a mode, perhaps the mode, of life” (1985: 311). If we consider closely the arguments of those who claim that stories differ from life, even if they agree that life is tangled up in stories, we �ind that the crucial point is the presupposition that stories are essentially retrospective, oriented toward the past, while inversely, life is supposed to be oriented toward the future. As stated by Marie-Laure Ryan: Life is lived looking forward, but it is told looking backward. Whether invented or experienced, events are normally emplotted retrospectively. Knowledge of the outcome shapes the narrator’s selection and evaluation of the preceding states and events; the crisis to be highlighted determines the exposition and the complication; the point to be made speci�ies the arguments to be used. While the laws of material causality operate forward, the laws of narrative, artistic, textual, or more generally of communicative causality operate overwhelmingly backwards. (2006: 78) Here again, I think it is quite easy to challenge this idea, because the temporal gap between life and its narration can be negated in many circumstances. If we consider the act of reading instead of the act of telling, it is clear that plot orients the attention of the audience toward the future; even when the reader is digging into the past of a mysterious crime, he awaits a future resolution. As stated by Sartre: “In reading, one foresees; one waits. One foresees the end of the sentence, the following sentence, the next page. One waits for them to con�irm or disappoint one’s foresights.” (What is Literature 1988: 50) But one could say that what really matters here is the fact that the story has been narrated retrospectively, even though it is read prospectively, because retrospection affects the basic features of narrativity. Well, there is no reason to believe that retrospection is an obligatory feature of all narratives. For example, Dorrit Cohn asserts that �ictions offer the possibility of a “simultaneous narration” with the use of the present tense. Genette also underlined that temporal relations between the act of telling and the story told could take any logical form: not only retrospective, but also simultaneous, intercalated, or even prospective (in the case of prophetic stories or predictions). Many novels in the trend of the “Nouveau Roman” have experimented with simultaneous narration, while Genette offers the epistolary novels that �lourished in the XVIIIth century as a typical example of intercalated narration (2007: 229-231). Anyway, Ryan argues that, because of the author/narrator dualism, even present-tense �iction “is really a disguised form of retrospective narration” (2006: 79). So this last argument implies that what truly matters here is not the experience of the reader or even the position of the narrator, but the epistemic position of the author that has shaped the plot in the light of its resolution. Here again, it is easy to �ind a multitude of counter-examples in literary history or beyond it. Many feuilletons �irst published in daily newspapers, in magazines, or cast on the television have set the foundations of their plots before their authors knew how they would end. We know for example that Eugene Sue has occasionally deviated from his original plans in order to avoid some too obvious twist in his telling of Les Mystères de Paris. And the showrunner of a television series is extremely cautious of his audience’s reactions when he validates a screenplay crafted by an army of writers. In both cases, it is obvious that a lack of retrospection doesn’t affect the strength of the plot, and in fact, quite the opposite: too much planning risks making the story too predictable. Sure, as stated by Kierkegaard, “life can only be understood backwards; but must be lived forwards”108. But if we admit that building a plot is an imitation of life that consists in a temporary de�iguration of the action orienting the attention toward an uncertain resolution point, instead of seeing it as a con�iguration whose aim is to explain the events, retrospection has no special importance: resolution can be crafted at any point of the story line. Natural Plots and Arti�icial Storytelling We should question the corpus we use when we refer to plot and to its supposed retrospective nature. It is not very surprising that in a narratological tradition, institutionally grounded in literary studies, we usually �ind our examples in novels, short stories, or fairy tales, and when we want to address factual narratives, in history books. Of course, in historiography, not only the point of view is obviously retrospective, but the aim of the author is to explain the past, not to puzzle the reader. In fact, contrary to White and Mink, I don’t think that �ictions and history books are designed the same way, especially when dealing with the question of their “emplotment”. Serialized narrations, we �ind in daily newspapers, namely information referring to events (affairs, mysteries, elections, con�licts, etc.) that last more than a day, offer a much more interesting comparative perspective for �ictional plots than historical con�igurations, because their effects on the audience are obviously closer. When, during a presidential campaign, we’re reading the news in order to be informed about the facts and events concerning the candidates, we are clearly stuck into what we could call the “natural plot” of a factual narration intercalated into the events told. In such a plot, we experience a genuine form of suspense and feel embedded in the middle of an un�inished story whose resolution point is clearly situated in the future by the political agenda, and whose form is still uncertain11. In a factual narration of this kind, the aesthetic feelings and cognitive reactions of the readers are very similar to those being experienced when we are dealing with a suspenseful novel. But what truly differentiates 10 Quoted by Seymour Chatman (2009: 31). 11 About serialized narrations published in daily newspapers, see (Revaz 2009, 167–194), (Baroni 2009, 72–82) and (Baroni, Pahud & Revaz 2006). About plots in literary journalism, see (Vanoost, 2013). 50 Raphaël BARONI Читање традиције 51 the two experiences is the way the reader will interpret the cause of the tension and the pragmatic consequences of the plot. In the �irst case, it is reality itself that offers a resistance against the attempts to foresee, tell or read the future, it is not just a strategy of the journalist-teller, whose aim is to inform his reader as clearly and fully as possible at every stages of the story. When we read Senate Leader Takes Risk Pushing Public Insurance Plan WASHINGTON — In pushing to include a government-run health insurance plan in the health care bill, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is taking a calculated gamble that the 60 members of his caucus could support the plan if it included a way for states to opt out.12 we know that we are engaged in a story that has began long ago and whose outcome is still very dif�icult to predict. The small portion of the story that we read that speci�ic day relates to a bigger plot that we have to reconstruct mentally by using our memory and our ability (and the ability of the journalist) to build hypotheses about the future. Even though the rest of the plot remains external to this portion of the story, several textual cues denote clearly the presence of a genuine form of suspense (someone “takes risk”, “is taking a calculated gamble”) orienting our attention toward an expected, but still hypothetical resolution (“his caucus could support the plan”) that might drastically affect the life of some of the readers. In this natural plot, the un�inished tale has a political dimension, because the end of the story can still be transformed, the acts of the teller and of his audience can change the course of history. The existence of a relative passivity in front of an unforeseeable future is in fact the necessary condition for true political action, indeed, it is only because we don’t know with total certainty how the story will end that we can engage in a free and responsible act of any kind. Of course, in daily newspapers we sometimes read stories about events that are already fully accomplished and leave no place for mysterious gaps. Mostly, they concern short-time events like, for example, sport events (political events usually taking more time). But other media offer a temporality that can preserve the interest of the story. For example, Ryan has analyzed the real-time narration (by a radio broadcast) of a baseball game between the Giants and the Cubs, in order to visit what she calls the “factory of plot” (2006: 93). Regarding the direct commentary of this dramatic game, she observes that “whoever wrote the script had a keen sense of narrative suspense and knew the Aristotelian principles of plot con�iguration” (2006: 88). She notes that commentaries activate the plot by combining “retrospective interpretation with the prospective evocation of a possible outcome” (2006: 89). But when Ryan “retells the game from the point of view of its outcome”, as would a newspaper journalist, she comes to a highly explicative story that, has lost all kind of narrative tension: 12 New York Times, October 23, 2009, A1, by Robert Pear and David M. Herszenhorn. The Cubs really had a chance to win, they got a great performance from their pitcher, and they put lots of men on base, but they could not score, and when Bielecki �inally collapsed in the eighth, they put in this wild reliever Mitch Williams with the base loaded, and boom, the amazing Will Clark did it again–he slapped a single to win the game. (2006: 91) Here, the outcome being the �irst information given, it functions clearly as a spoiler or a suspense-killer, and we are confronted with a de-plotted narration that, like most history books, doesn’t try to reproduce the “natural plot” of the original event, but to counter its effects, i.e. to inform a reader still ignorant of the result or the details of the game. We see that narrations can have different forms according to the functions they �ill or the context in which they are produced: some mimetic narratives (mainly �ictional, but not only13) are made to puzzle their audience by using the art of emplotment, and by doing so, they try to imitate factual narratives that put into words the emerging story of ongoing events, with their natural plots still open ended. In the �irst case, intriguing narratives try to give to the reader the representation of a dynamic and unstable con�iguration of events, while in the second case, the progression depends of some kind of “actuality” of the discourse, thus giving the opportunity for political or responsible action. These two are clearly different from de-plotted (or con�iguring) stories, like history books or sportive accounts we �ind in daily newspapers, who aim to expose and/or explain as clearly as possible already accomplished events14. Fictional plots may present a formal similarity with natural plots, but in the �irst case, we know that the storyworld is, in fact, a creation of a storyteller. In �iction, it is the act of telling that is intentionally reluctant and, by being so, arti�icial plots can be described as “mimetic”, in the sense that they try to imitate what makes natural plots interesting and tellable. In such story, the passivity of the audience is deeper than in natural plots, because we cannot interfere with the storyline, since it is designed by someone else15, but suspense or curiosity become enjoyable because the stakes are only �ictive. And the reader can still oppose his predictions to the reluctant representation of the teller and exercise his or her ability to avoid surprises or to recon�igure old perspectives. Consequently, �ictions become a safe training zone for learning how to deal with the emotional and cognitive aspects of natural plots. 13 For plots in literary journalism, see Vanoost (2013). 14 For more details on this distinction between “intriguing” and “con�iguring” stories, see Baroni (2009). 15 When the author transforms the plot of his novel in reaction to its audience’s reaction, the latter is obviously in a less passive situation. In Stephen King’s famous novel, Misery, the intervention of an unsatis�ied reader goes so far that the writer is sequestrated and tortured in order to modify his unpublished novel. Conan Doyle was also forced to resuscitate Sherlock Holmes after he thought he got rid of him de�initely on the Reichenbach falls. 52 Raphaël BARONI Читање традиције 53 Formally, the only crucial difference between natural and arti�icial plots is that the latter appears as an intensi�ication of the former and a more meaningful one, because emplotment is intentional and crafted by an author, and not by contingency or some kind of hypothetical divine entity. In fairy tales, for example, the hero always receives by chance a magical object just before he or she has to pass a test where this specific object is needed, but in realistic novels, such a miraculous adequacy might look suspicious. Also, when we are dealing with speci�ic genres of �ictions, we have some guarantees that a clear resolution might occur ultimately, hopefully a surprising but congruent one, while in life, some mysteries (but not all of them) might remain unsolved. Nevertheless, life is also intense and meaningful, even before we tell anything about it and even before we arrive at its �inal deadly point. There are small victories or losses constantly, and some mysteries are sometimes resolved, some secrets are revealed. But the global picture will always be evanescent. The meaning of life is something fragile, more or less temporary and uncertain. We should never be fully satis�ied with the old plots of our life, because their meaning might change over the time, and because the stories already resolved matter less than the ones still unresolved16. So we’re condemned to wait for something new to enlighten our future. If we agree to consider plot as a vivid experience of a yet unresolved story, if we accept that complication is more vital than its potential resolution, then we have to focus on the narrative gaps that orient our attention toward a feared or hoped resolution, instead of considering the plot as something already formed, a kind of explanation or a retrospective con�iguration making sense of the nonsense, and bringing order to a supposedly disorganized �low of events. Then, we should reset the debate between those who claim that life must become a narrative in order to bring sense to the absurd �low of events, and those, like Galen Strawson, who argue against this belief 17, because both sides eventually assume that emplotment is an operation that transforms life by enriching it with qualities that it didn’t possess in the �irst place. On the contrary, both natural and arti�icial plots, life and stories that imitate life, are a blend of sense and nonsense, of discontinuity and continuity, of knowledge and ignorance, of action and passion. Our tentative grasp of life, our blurring perspectives that shape the plots in which we are tangled up, re�lect ultimately the limitations but also the possibilities of humans plunged into an antagonistic world18. 16 We could say the same thing about arti�icial plots because those we expect to �ind in the books we haven’t read yet seem more appealing than those we simply remember. 17 See for example the debate between Galen Strawson and Paul John Eakin. 18 Marc Escola also criticises the supposedly retrospective nature of narrations, but he uses a different, more historical, argument. He shows that the narratological consensus concerning the retrospective nature of the plot is rooted not only in the Aristotelian tradition, but more signi�icantly in the modern poetics of the short story, which is supposed to form a whole, as opposed to the episodic nature of the novel. He also mentions the in�luence of Edgar Allan Poe and his philosophy of composition LITERATURE Abbott, H. Porter. “Story, Plot, and Narration.” In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Edited by David Herman. 39–51. Cambridge, OH: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007. Baroni, Raphaël. La Tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité et surprise. Paris, Le Seuil, 2007. Baroni, Raphaël. L‘Œuvre du temps. Poétique de la discordance narrative. Paris, Le Seuil, 2009. Baroni, Raphaël. “Tellability.” In Handbook of Narratology. Edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. 447–454. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2009. Baroni, Raphaël, Stéphanie Pahud and Françoise Revaz. “De l’intrigue littéraire à l’intrigue médiatique.”, A Contrario 4:2 (2006): 123–143. Baroni Raphaël and Françoise Revaz. Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, coll. “Theory and Interpretation of Narrative”, in press. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetric of Fiction. Chicago and London: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984. Butor, Michel. La Modi�ication. Paris: Minuit, 1957. Carr, David. “Narrative and the real world: An argument for continuity.”, History and Theory 25 (1986): 117–131. Carr, David, Charles Taylor, and Paul Ricœur. “Table ronde/Round Table”, Revue de l’université d’Ottawa 55 (1985): 301–322 Chatman, Seymour. “Backwards.” Narrative 17:1 (2009): 31–55. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Dannenberg, Hilary P. “Plot.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan. 435–437. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Dannenberg, Hilary P. “Ontological plotting: Narrative as a Multiplicity of Temporal Dimensions.” In The Dynamics of Narrative Form, edited by John Pier, 159–189. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2004. of The Raven. Escola concludes that this poetic of the whole (the “dénouement” governing the writing of every parts of the story) might work on some modern novels, but is inadequate to describe the narrative organization of stories conceived and consumed by episodes, such as contemporary television series as well as classical novels of the XVIIth and XVIIIth century and the “roman feuilleton” of the XIXth century. 54 Raphaël BARONI Читање традиције 55 Dannenberg, Hilary P. Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 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Le Sens de l’intrigue, ou la narrativité, le jeu et l’invention du diable. Laval : Presses de l’Univ. Laval, 2003. Rafael Baroni Zaplet u životu i �ikciji – kognitivna rekonceptualizacija (rezime) U radu se razmatra pitanje zapleta, koji je jedan od osnovnih, ali istovremeno i najneuhvatljivijih koncepata u narativnoj teoriji. Naglasak stavljamo na rekonceptualizaciju zapleta u savremenoj naratologiji, posebno unutar retoričkog i kognitivnog pristupa. Zaplet je viđen kao nestabilna matrica mogućnosti unutar kojih intencije autora imaju sporednu ulogu. Sa tog aspekta sagledavamo fenomen „prirodnih zapleta“ koji u ljudskom iskustvu postoje pre nego što se kon�igurišu u završene retrospektivne narative. Kao studiju slučaja korišćeni su tekstovi koji su u nastavcima izlazili u dnevnoj štampi. Koncept prirodnih zapleta ne preispituje samo postavke �ilozo�ije istorije i problem poverenja u faktuelne narative, već i estetski potencijal publicističke proze. Istovremeno, ovaj koncept je od krucijalnog značaja za promišljanje mimetičkog statusa narativnih reprezentacija života. 56 Raphaël BARONI