The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

different ways. This experience, in which
each reader ‘writes’ or constructs their own
text, Barthes sees as liberating.
Although such works may indeed be
used by the patient and inventive for
individualistic self-expression, Barthes
implies a heedlessly optimistic view of
the reader. Faced with segments which
can mean almost anything and an absence
of authorial direction, readers will imagine
and impose interpretations deriving from
their previous habits of sense-making and
thus from their acquired conventions:
supposedly liberated reading becomes
indistinguishable from uninventive, selfindulgent
mental drift. A more useful
approach to pleasure’s origins is to
analyse the experience of having expectations
sometimes confirmed, sometimes
surprised by a text (impossible if it is
totally plural). At a first reading, there is
delight in a release from and expansion of
our limited consciousness as we compare
our responses with the text’s; at a later
reading, the no less pleasurable realization
that our perceptions of it have altered
and that therefore our relation with it
remains productive. See also AESTHETICS,
READER.
See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of
the Text (trans. 1976), S/Z (trans. 1975);
Donald W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic
Theory (1974); William Wordsworth,
‘Preface’ (1802 version) to Lyrical Ballads.
MHP
Plot A term of highly varied status. It
can mean just the paraphrasable story of
a work – the simple narrative line which
we can then flesh out by considering character
and description, tone and texture,
pattern and myth; E. M. Forster’s ‘low’,
‘atavistic’ story-telling. So creative writing
courses offer compendia of plots; so
many works (lyric poems, modernist
novels) can be ‘without’ it. The usage is
Plot 177
partly derived from Aristotle’s word
mythos in the Poetics, commonly translated
as ‘plot’; and for a richer sense of
the term it is worth recalling what he said.
Aristotle’s plot was the mimesis (i.e. the
analogous making) of an action. He distinguished
six parts in his exemplary
species, tragedy, but did not reduce them
to equivalence: plot constitutes the
dynamic whole to which the other parts
relate, the necessary order as opposed to
the enabling features of development. It is
the distilling centre of the choices available
to the author; having determined a
medium (stage, book) and a mode (lyric,
dramatic), the author must also choose
other essential principles of coherence.
The plot must have a shape (e.g. a rise in
the hero’s fortune followed by a descent);
it must have a sequence or order determining
the kind and degree of effort at
particular points (beginning, middle,
end); it must have a size (magnitude,
duration) which will help determine that
shape and sequence. It must have agents
and a society: for these there must be a
language, appropriate not only to them
but also to the other elements of the structure.
It must have a developing psychology
culminating internally in good
tragedy in the protagonist and externally
in an effect on the audience (CATHARSIS);
and it must accord with and seek out general
human experience (universality).
Aristotle’s mythos is close to Henry
James’s assumptions in his preface to The
Portrait of a Lady, when he distinguishes
a donnée and then sees certain elements
as being of the essence and others of the
provision. This adds what is perhaps
implicit in Aristotle; that there is play in
writing for continuous choice; plot is
emergent from the selective logic of the
writerly act.
Few twentieth-century critics took up
this complex usage, viewing plot as a