HIS PRIVATE ROD

COUNT FOSCO

In the twentieth century, plot-driven novels fell from critical favour. Even
Dickens was viewed suspiciously, not only on the grounds that his novels
were sometimes sentimental, but also that they had simply too many events;
F. R. Leavis, the most influential mid-century critic, was prepared to admit
only Hard Times into his canon of English novels. The anti-plot tendency
seems to have begun with the high reputation of the late novels of Henry
James, where the interest lies in the thought processes that shape motive
two steps, in other words, away from action itself. It must have seemed
logical that if this was high art, which it was, then the opposite anything
with story in it must be low. The tendency had picked up speed by the time
of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. One of the obvious points about Mrs
Dalloway and Ulysses is that nothing much happens; the underlying aim of
both these novels was to reproduce on paper the experience of being alive
and their secondary aim was to refashion those sensations into something
less molecular and more shapely. Such impulses had previously been the
territory of poetry, but the insight of Woolf and Joyce was to see how prose
could do the job as well or better, provided the narrative was freed from the
tyranny of plot. There was a further dividend, as all literature students were
taught, in that a non-linear structure seemed appropriate to a world broken
by war; it imitated the poetic fragmentation of The Waste Land and the
breaking up of the picture plane by modernist painters in Paris before 1914.
Through the twentieth century, the stock of plot-based novels continued to
fall. Story seemed to become the preserve of lending library authors such
as Charles Morgan, Hugh Walpole and J. B. Priestley, then to be taken
further downmarket by genre writers, into thrillers and detective stories,
until, by about 1970, few literary novelists allowed incident of any serious
kind to put its big foot on their lawns. The uneasy reputation of John Fowles
is an example of this consensus. Fowless great talent as a writer, despite a
certain literary tricksiness, lay in his feel for narrative. Sometimes, as he
himself admitted, this was so intoxicating that he could barely control it; he
cited The Magus as an example. The gift made him no friends in British
mainstream critical opinion where, in the 1960s and 70s, the whole idea of
story was considered dubious, though American universities took a different
view of Fowless standing.
Its hard to say when plot began to be rehabilitated. Perhaps when more

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