The Modes of Fiction: A Plot Morphology

Abstract

A FEW YEARS AGO a bright student dropped out of my class and out of the university. She felt that she was carrying a basket around in which the English faculty was tossing books, and that it had filled. Some books were dropping off the top and some out the bottom as new books were added, but nothing was coming together. This incident dramatized for me the need to articulate organizations among literary works. My approach has been through plot.l One kind of plot morphology might be a pigeon-hole system with some explicit rationale, a generator of labels and categories. However, to answer our experience of fiction, a morphology must go beyond this. I begin here with labels and categories, and I move to a discussion of the dynamics of plot. For fictional plot is primarily an orderly process in which we participate as readers. A morphology which is true to our experience of fiction can not be static; the labels are finally less important than the attained insight into the ways fiction, as an experience for us as readers, relates to our experience of reality. My starting point is the discussion of the historical modes of fiction in the First Essay of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957). While I will extend the modal definitions by the end of this essay, I had best begin by recording my understanding of the modes as described by Frye. I take it that Frye's modal discriminators fall into two classes: those which concern the relationship between the fictive universe of a work and our usual reality expectations, and those which concern the nature of the emotional transaction between a reader and a work. Figure 1 is my version of Frye's scheme of modes (exclusive of myth, to which I shall return). I do not mean to deviate from Frye at this point in my descriptions of the emotional and environmental