Writing: A Passage to India, & not stopping when the plot ends · 1:23am Feb 24th, 2014
The plot in A Passage to India involves a Muslim Indian accused of assaulting an Englishwoman in the Marabar Caves. When the plot was wrapped up on page 257, I looked at the last page, and wondered why the book went on to page 362. I tried to guess what the next hundred pages were for, but couldn’t. I guessed, though, that it would have to do with the principles in my earlier post "The story isn’t over when the plot is", which it did.
In retrospect, it seems obvious: The plot is about a conflict between the English rulers and their Indian subjects, but the story is about a friendship between the Englishman Fielding and a Muslim Indian, Aziz. The plot’s central question is resolved in a court room, but the story’s central question is whether an Englishman and an Indian can be friends. The plot shows the two men going to great efforts for each other’s sake, and one imagines on seeing its resolution that they must be fast friends forever afterwards. But the story’s claim is that this is impossible: The forces of Empire, and British society, and religion and race, which are vast and omnipresent, forbid it; struggling against them is quite beyond the capacities of humans, who seldom know why they do what they do, and make out better when they follow their feelings and the herd than when they try to act reasonably.
So the final hundred pages have the structure of a short story, which one can almost imagine existing independently of the novel preceding it. The two men begin it as friends, but disagreements, misunderstandings, and racial characteristics (Forster cannot seem to decide whether these are real or imagined) divide them. The key misunderstanding is cleared up, but the hate Aziz temporarily had for Fielding has already pushed him into a new state of mind from which he cannot return to loving Fielding, and they part knowing they will only drift further apart. The final paragraphs:
Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: "Down with the English anyhow. That's certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don't make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it's fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then "--he rode against him furiously-- "and then," he concluded, half kissing him, "you and I shall be friends."
"Why can't we be friends now?" said the other, holding him affectionately. "It's what I want. It's what you want."
But the horses didn't want it--they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, "No, not yet," and the sky said, "No, not there."
It still puzzles me why the last 100 pages begins with a long description of a Hindu religious ceremony, which neither Fielding nor Aziz attend. My best guess is that, in a novel which pits the English Empire against India, and an Englishman against an Indian, it would be too easy to imagine that the Indian represents India. Forster repeats several times that no one can represent India, as a Muslim Indian understands the Hindu who lives next door to him less than a Scot can understand a Transylvanian. The purpose of the temple scene may be to remind us that Aziz is just one Indian, and to refute the view that Fielding the ex-Christian and Aziz the Muslim would each have that humans are important, singular, and somehow exempt from the rules that limit the actions of all other things.
(There is an extreme continuity error at one of the climaxes of the book: Two characters go out onto a lake in a rowboat and collide with another boat carrying idols that are a key part of the city’s biggest Hindu ceremony. When they fall in the water, two other main characters who were definitely not in the boat fall into the water with them, and their impossible presence adds nothing to the story. Forster seems to have vacillated at his climax between whether his viewpoint character's boat was running into the boat containing the idols, or the boat containing the other two characters, and written it as being both simultaneously. This nonsensical scene presents a sticky problem for the translator or editor publishing a new edition after the author's death.)
I wish I could write popular blogposts about my experiences reading interestingly terrible books and the lessons I've learned, but I'm afraid I don't find many examples that would actually be educational. The most recent one I've read is The Cassandra Project, and I've only learned two things: Jack McDevitt likes writing mystery novels, not science fiction novels; and I should stop picking through my public library for good fiction and instead do research beforehand. (I had previously read some other novel by McDevitt that was also a long, excessively meandering and boring journey to discovering a substantially uncreative secret, but I had the misfortune of nor remembering it until midway through this one)
...This is totally on topic because, if I'm correct in reasoning that Bad Horse is at least somewhat venting, then this is empathic. *Convincing smile*
This reminds me of You Can Fight Fate, the third fic in the Time Loop Trilogy. The plot ends on chapter 5, but the story has
10 chapters9 chapters plus a chapter of author notes.1868110 I'm not venting. I loved the book. But vent away.
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Obviously your enjoyment of the book is so immense that were you to not release your emotions in this blogpost, (and it is positively brimming with emotions that truly touch me,) you would explode.
You can say you're not venting, but I'll just point out those suspicious gaseous emissions you seem to keep having.
1868155 So there's such a thing as happy venting?
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i1057.photobucket.com/albums/t386/Derpmind/eyes.jpg
Yes. Why wouldn't there be?
The term would be denouement, wouldn't it? The main plot ends with the climax and resolution of the main conflict, but one needs to tie up the ends, and often one needs to resolve the theme (sometimes by having the characters look back on what just happened and considering its significance).
To take an example from my own writing, the climax to An Extended Performance comes in Chapter 7 where protagonist defeats antagonist and saves the city, but Chapter 8 is thematically-necessary to show what Celestia thinks of what just happened and what decisions Trixie makes in consequence of her experiences. Without Chapter 8 the story would just sort of stop, rather than coming to a satisfying conclusion. There would be a lot of loose ends, and a story shouldn't have lots of loose ends -- it should at least indicate the situations of all important characters at its end unless a mystery as to their fates makes logical sense (often, this is a Sequel Hook).
Denouements are normally short, but they don't have to be -- if the plot or theme are sufficiently complex, they can be multi-chapter. This is especially common in long fiction. Bad editing can over-abbreviate the denouements, leaving stories that end with multiple loose threads hanging, even though the POV character should be aware of the fates of those characters. I've seen this done in some otherwise-good tales, for instance Jack Vance's The Palace of Love and numerous James Michener novels.
I would guess the author *really* wanted to put a scene with X in his story, and having gotten to the end of the book without finding a logical spot to put his treasured scene in, he decided just to plop it right on down and pretend it was intentional. I can sympathize. I've had that same urge, even though I'm not paid by the word. (I can see the author calling out to his wife, "Look, honey! I put in a little extra scene so we can pay for that toaster that broke.")
1868451 That's the word. I ran into that with Monster in the Twilight. The story effectively ends three chapters before the Epilogue, but if I had just stopped there, this giant ball of plot threads would have been left hanging. (as it is, I still had enough threads to knit a sweater ever after I was done, but it gives me a stream of events to write whenever I get free time)
1868451 I think denouement is a plot-related term, e.g., "but what happened to Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom?" At best, it doesn't make the distinction between plot/subplot and plot/theme resolution.
The friendship between the two main characters in this case is not "plot"; one doesn't come to page 257 and wonder what happens to them. They're both there on page 257. Their friendship is theme, not plot.
1868424 Please never post that picture again.
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What would the term then be for a continuation of theme? I actually don't see how one can continue theme without also continuing plot, in that even if the theme is cemented by a purely-intellectual conversation between two characters, or even an internal dialogue ...
"I learned that day that I should never stick my hand in the garbage disposal, thought Lefty, who that day had received his distinctive nickname, and that it is in general a bad idea. Certainly, I will never do it more than once again"
... that would still be a form of action, albeit a very abstract one.
I don't think there is such a word; the notion of theme comprising part of dramatic structure hardly exists.
You can't continue theme without stuff happening, but you can have a definite plot that's ended and still have stuff happen. Like the final scene in Star Wars, or Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Star Wars scene doesn't accomplish anything at all, plot-wise.
1869079 denouement:
Merriam-Webster:
1. the final outcome of the main dramatic complication in a literary work
2. the outcome of a complex sequence of events
Oxford English Dictionary:
1. the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.
1.1 the climax of a chain of events, usually when something is decided or made clear:
I waited by the eighteenth green to see the denouement
Oxford Concise Dictionary:
1 the final unravelling of a plot or complicated situation.
2 the final scene in a play, novel, etc., in which the plot is resolved.
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But they do possibly contribute to the plot of any sequels, real or hypothetical, because they tell us what happened to the characters (Star Wars) or the main artifact (Raiders of the Lost Ark) in consequence of the main plot. Hence they could be seen as "extended plot" or "meta-plot," whether or not any sequels later reference them. It is in the context of this extended plot that the denouement is relevant to the story, and why its absence is noticeable should it be edited away.
1869857 The final scene in Star Wars is the awards ceremony, which tells us nothing more about what happened to any of the characters other than that Leia kissed Luke (or maybe it was Han), which they could've easily put in an earlier scene instead.
There isn't a clear line between "theme" and "subplot"--see bookplayer's "How to do a sonic rainboom" for a case where the subplot is, approximately, the theme--but there's enough of a distinction, often enough, that I think it's important not to roll this up into "denouement" and then lose sight of the distinction that I'm not talking about wrapping up loose ends, I'm talking about wrapping up "what the story is really about" after wrapping up the plot and its loose ends.
Personally, I don't think it is possible to continue after the plot ends, because if you're still writing then the plot is still moving. Now, the main conflict--or, perhaps I should say external conflict--might be over before the book, but never the plot. This is simply because I believe plot to mean the design of the book--the stuff that happens, whether external or internal or symbolic or whichever. If the story is more about Aziz's and Fielding's friendship than anything else, I would say the court case was more framing than the actual plot; the plot itself would be about their friendship, how it begins and progresses and changes, and ends when the novel ends. Or it was a multi-level plot, with more than one thread. But if the story continues as you seem to suggest it does, dispelling our assumption that their friendship lasts, I would most certainly classify that as plot.
The only way a work of fiction can continue beyond the plot is, I think, if the author simply muses or lectures for a considerable amount before finally finishing, without anything actually happening or the character doing something. But, if there's any action or type of progression at all, whether in the message/theme or the emotional punch the author wants to deliver, their idea of life they want to convey or in what the characters do or what happens to them, then there's still plot.
Could be wrong though.