The Ill-Tempered Plot Devisor
May. 20th, 2004 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jere7myI finally got around to reading Nick Lowe's famous essay, The Well-Tempered Plot Device, which ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elysdir pointed me to in late March. Rarely have I come across an essay with such a high ratio of cocksureness to content. I realize that it predated the explosion of the Internet, which has made it impossible to vent your spleen half-assedly without having your head handed to you by legions of armchair critics and pedants, but I would have hoped there were enough pedants reading Ansible in 1986 to keep him on his toes.
[Caveat: Some spoilers for Thomas Covenant below.]
Lowe's point, if you don't care to read the essay, is that SF and fantasy are burdened with arbitrary "plot coupons", which lazy authors use as convenient motivators for action without their needing to hold any intrinsic meaning. Congratulations, Mr. Lowe: you've rediscovered the MacGuffin, forty years after Angus MacPhail (friend of Hitchcock) coined the term. All of storytelling is laden with MacGuffins, be they One Rings or statues of falcons or ship-launching beauties or albino sperm whales. (Moby Dick is certainly a MacGuffin: he appears when convenient to the plot; he motivates all of the characters in ways that are convenient to the plot; his own inscrutable motivation at any given moment can make the plot veer in any direction Melville wants.) Allegorical fiction, any fiction which condenses a concept or a force or a message into a concrete symbol, threatens to expose the author's guiding hand.
The thing is, there needs to be something to move the plot. It can arise purely from interpersonal conflicts—"real" conflicts—but SF's greatest strength, imho, is that it gives writers unprecedented freedom to create motivators. Want to explore what a woman might do if she found herself slowly fading into permanent invisibility? Ever wonder what fundamentalists would do if they learned their unborn son was going to permanently legalize abortion when he grows up? SF allows people to address incredible issues directly—often through use of a MacGuffin, a talisman or a scrying screen or a time machine—and once the motivator is made concrete and comprehensible the author is free to focus entirely on the characters' reactions to it.
The problem is not the MacGuffin; it's an uninteresting response to the MacGuffin. Lowe complains that Thomas Covenant's quest to remake the Staff of Law is simply a plot coupon—but Covenant's response to the destruction of the first Staff is what's interesting there. It's not a Quest of Staff-Making; it's a Quest of Atonement, for raping Lena and for everything else he ever did to the Land. Another character wouldn't have had the same response, and Covenant's response (a wrongheaded one, as it turns out) served to reveal his character in ways I, at least, found interesting. That's the crux—does the motivator motivate in interesting ways? Does it reveal new facets of a character? Does it generate interesting interpersonal conflicts? That's all it needs to do; it doesn't matter what it is, or if it lights up and plays ragtime, so long as the people around it respond to it in interesting ways. Captain Queeg's strawberries were just strawberries—but because Captain Queeg was interesting, the strawberries became interesting.
Lowe commits a graver crime in his essay—he admits to not having read the book in which Covenant goes on this particular quest, The One Tree:
He assumes he can deduce the future plot from his own biases, and of course he's dead wrong; the Quest fails, and fails in an interesting way, because Covenant's motivations were suspect from the outset. (Remember life before the web, when it took more than eight seconds to check these things out?) Lowe does exactly the same thing with Wolfe's Book of the New Sun:
Suffice to say that the origins and purposes of the Claw of the Conciliator are vital to the revelations in the fourth volume, and central to the Christian allegory Wolfe has carefully constructed. Don't ask Lowe about it, though, because he doesn't actually seem interested in cogent analysis (despite the fact that all six volumes of Covenant and all four volumes of Sun had been available for four years when he wrote this essay); he wants to entertain the crowd by lampooning what he perceives as easy targets, lumping Wolfe and Donaldson in with Lionel Fanthorpe, and doesn't bother checking his facts. (For someone complaining about lazy writing, he certainly does leave his pants down, doesn't he?)
Lowe does other injustices to the world of fiction (dismissing all of Fate and Divine Intervention as authorial laziness, e.g., which would rather surprise Homer), but I'm sure all of this has been pointed out in the last eighteen years. Me, I think there are indeed barriers to quality in SF, but rather than pinning the blame on perfectly serviceable (and, granted, misusable) plot devices, I think we should look at the self-appointed Stewards of Quality who build fences around what they think is Acceptable and dismiss everything outside. SF, as big as it is these days, is also insular, and susceptible to the arbitrary tides of acclamation and condemnation that arise in a semi-closed community. It's possible for one person, by standing up and saying something stupid in a crowd-pleasing way, to shift the tide. This is me wading into the surf and kicking at the waves.
elysdir pointed me to in late March. Rarely have I come across an essay with such a high ratio of cocksureness to content. I realize that it predated the explosion of the Internet, which has made it impossible to vent your spleen half-assedly without having your head handed to you by legions of armchair critics and pedants, but I would have hoped there were enough pedants reading Ansible in 1986 to keep him on his toes.[Caveat: Some spoilers for Thomas Covenant below.]
Lowe's point, if you don't care to read the essay, is that SF and fantasy are burdened with arbitrary "plot coupons", which lazy authors use as convenient motivators for action without their needing to hold any intrinsic meaning. Congratulations, Mr. Lowe: you've rediscovered the MacGuffin, forty years after Angus MacPhail (friend of Hitchcock) coined the term. All of storytelling is laden with MacGuffins, be they One Rings or statues of falcons or ship-launching beauties or albino sperm whales. (Moby Dick is certainly a MacGuffin: he appears when convenient to the plot; he motivates all of the characters in ways that are convenient to the plot; his own inscrutable motivation at any given moment can make the plot veer in any direction Melville wants.) Allegorical fiction, any fiction which condenses a concept or a force or a message into a concrete symbol, threatens to expose the author's guiding hand.
The thing is, there needs to be something to move the plot. It can arise purely from interpersonal conflicts—"real" conflicts—but SF's greatest strength, imho, is that it gives writers unprecedented freedom to create motivators. Want to explore what a woman might do if she found herself slowly fading into permanent invisibility? Ever wonder what fundamentalists would do if they learned their unborn son was going to permanently legalize abortion when he grows up? SF allows people to address incredible issues directly—often through use of a MacGuffin, a talisman or a scrying screen or a time machine—and once the motivator is made concrete and comprehensible the author is free to focus entirely on the characters' reactions to it.
The problem is not the MacGuffin; it's an uninteresting response to the MacGuffin. Lowe complains that Thomas Covenant's quest to remake the Staff of Law is simply a plot coupon—but Covenant's response to the destruction of the first Staff is what's interesting there. It's not a Quest of Staff-Making; it's a Quest of Atonement, for raping Lena and for everything else he ever did to the Land. Another character wouldn't have had the same response, and Covenant's response (a wrongheaded one, as it turns out) served to reveal his character in ways I, at least, found interesting. That's the crux—does the motivator motivate in interesting ways? Does it reveal new facets of a character? Does it generate interesting interpersonal conflicts? That's all it needs to do; it doesn't matter what it is, or if it lights up and plays ragtime, so long as the people around it respond to it in interesting ways. Captain Queeg's strawberries were just strawberries—but because Captain Queeg was interesting, the strawberries became interesting.
Lowe commits a graver crime in his essay—he admits to not having read the book in which Covenant goes on this particular quest, The One Tree:
and of course all Covenant has to do now, in a Lensmanesque escalation of the same basic routine he went through in previous volumes, is go chugging off to cut himself a new Staff of Plot from the jolly old One Tree. I don't know how he does; four volumes was quite enough.
He assumes he can deduce the future plot from his own biases, and of course he's dead wrong; the Quest fails, and fails in an interesting way, because Covenant's motivations were suspect from the outset. (Remember life before the web, when it took more than eight seconds to check these things out?) Lowe does exactly the same thing with Wolfe's Book of the New Sun:
I'd better rip away the veil and confirm their suspicions; because if the Claw of the Conciliator is anything more than a general-purpose plot voucher I'm buggered if I can see what. I confess I haven't got on to the Citadel [book 4] yet, but can it really explain this kind of thing?
Suffice to say that the origins and purposes of the Claw of the Conciliator are vital to the revelations in the fourth volume, and central to the Christian allegory Wolfe has carefully constructed. Don't ask Lowe about it, though, because he doesn't actually seem interested in cogent analysis (despite the fact that all six volumes of Covenant and all four volumes of Sun had been available for four years when he wrote this essay); he wants to entertain the crowd by lampooning what he perceives as easy targets, lumping Wolfe and Donaldson in with Lionel Fanthorpe, and doesn't bother checking his facts. (For someone complaining about lazy writing, he certainly does leave his pants down, doesn't he?)
Lowe does other injustices to the world of fiction (dismissing all of Fate and Divine Intervention as authorial laziness, e.g., which would rather surprise Homer), but I'm sure all of this has been pointed out in the last eighteen years. Me, I think there are indeed barriers to quality in SF, but rather than pinning the blame on perfectly serviceable (and, granted, misusable) plot devices, I think we should look at the self-appointed Stewards of Quality who build fences around what they think is Acceptable and dismiss everything outside. SF, as big as it is these days, is also insular, and susceptible to the arbitrary tides of acclamation and condemnation that arise in a semi-closed community. It's possible for one person, by standing up and saying something stupid in a crowd-pleasing way, to shift the tide. This is me wading into the surf and kicking at the waves.
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-20 06:31 am (UTC)Like Christians who are suspicious of Harry Potter. Haven't they seen how clearly Good is marked and how clearly it wins? Speaking of which, I'm *really* hoping I can find a version which is subtitled in Spanish or French in one of those countries within the first couple weeks of my arriving in Spain -- it comes out in the US 3 days after I've left. If I CAN'T, I'll be heartbroken!
Speaking also of movies and Homer, gonna see Troy tomorrow. I'm still miffed I couldn't see it with my seminar, because they would've been the most amusing people to go with, but my mom is familiar with the story at least and will probably bear with whatever chatter I have during it. I just want it to be pretty, I have no illusions about the plot, heh.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-20 07:12 pm (UTC)I mean, there may be Christians who claim that Harry Potter is bad because the *execution* of the premise is faulty and morally suspect from their point of view, but many of them just think that anything that portrays personal use of magic/supernatural powers, especially in a positive or unquestioning light, is something they don't want to be a part of. Unless the whole Harry Potter universe ends up turning into a criticism and attack of the evils of using magic at all (which, you never know, it could end up being -- it's kind of interesting how badness in the HP universe has shifted from intolerant Muggles, the Dursleys, to intolerant pureblood mages, the Death Eaters).
I mean, I personally don't know whether the Gor series is good or bad -- I'm told the execution is terrible and childish, but even if it's not I think the basic concept, a universe where the "Natural Order" is a race of human male masters and human female slaves, is enough of a turn-off for me that I don't really want to take the time to find out.
I think there are critics who just think any story that's about random contingencies rather than deterministic or decision-based human interaction turns them off. They shouldn't really attempt to criticize stories about reaction to random contingency on the merits, then, but they unfortunately do. It's as annoying as reading a review of an action movie by a critic who obviously just doesn't like action movies, or of horror movies by someone who's squicked by any blood or death on the screen, or of sf/f by people who are offended by "made-up worlds".
no subject
Date: 2004-05-21 04:54 am (UTC)Yes, I've realized this -- my mom is very wary of books which involve the supernatural, so she avoids some of them. This is why I apologized for the strength of my opinions at the beginning, heh. I'm still wary.
I guess I might be more inclined to consider those critics on some level if they clearly labeled their opinions 'I haven't read this because I am troubled by the premise', which as you note, not all do.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-09 05:38 pm (UTC)