Reading for the Plot

Of the 35-40 books I've read on story and plot construction, Peter Brooks, "Reading for the Plot", has helped me reach the furthest understanding in the dialectic nature of story/plot and the deep affect some have the ability to transmit. After reading this book, my perception has changed on how to view/interpret narrative discourse. In a world of "how-to" books that treat the subject as if you were trying to bake a cake, Peter Brooks shames them by treating plot with the respect it deserves.

Peter Brooks shows, through a series of sensitive analyses of ninetenth and twentieth century novels (and also Freud's case history of the "Wolf Man") what can be got out of novels by attending to what is sometimes thought to be the dryest, most uninteresting thing about them: their plots. Brooks' main argument is that "plot" is not something static - like a skeleton keeping a story together - but something that is continually shaping and being shaped by stories as they develop through time. Brooks main mentor in this book is Sigmund Freud, but Reading for the Plot is very far from the kind of psychoanalytic criticism that seeks to explain Hamlet's neuroticisms in terms of his relationship with Gertrude. Rather, Brooks relates Freud's theories to narratives themselves, showing how, for example, narratives simutaneously engender and thwart readers' desire for "closure." The essay on Dickens' Great Expectations is particularly illuminating, probably because Great Expectations is a novel whose very title describes the kind of plot-philia Brooks is talking about.