Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel by Pardis Dabashi (review)

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• Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel by Pardis Dabashi
• Seo Hee Im

DABASHI, PARDIS. Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. $30.00 paperback; $99.00 cloth; $29.99 e-book.

Pardis Dabashi's Losing the Plot begins in familiar territory: even as manifestos declaimed the need to make it new, actually existing modernist writing remained conflicted about jettisoning plot. After all, plotted narratives were compelling for good reason. They provided "existential promises" (8) by making imaginable nice things like "possessive liberal individualism, heterosexual marriage, and a progressive and teleological view of history" (8). Quickly, though, Dabashi departs for riskier and more hypothetical terrains, into claims about the payoffs of taking seriously the feelings of various writers (as humans) and characters (also, surprisingly, as humans). Often exhilarating and never boring, Losing the Plot is perhaps most valuable as an occasion to reflect on what it means to do criticism, or more specifically, which kinds of evidence we are willing to admit into a reading.

Dabashi rightly reminds us that modernist extrications from realist plot must be understood in the context of the rise of Hollywood cinema. For Dabashi, that means understanding the ambivalence that modernist writers would have felt personally. The writers examined—Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner—must have looked on with envy and dismay as film, inheriting plots that modernist fiction abandoned, took over "the cultural, formal, and psychic work of the bourgeois novel" (8). Authorial intent, let alone authorial feeling, is a notoriously tricky thing, and most of us learn in graduate school to avoid contact with it, like Medusa's hair, by keeping our eyes studiously trained on the text. But Losing the Plot engages freely in hypotheses (at the end of each chapter with rhetorical questions) about how authors must have found private comfort in watching films or in identifying with specific actors. Such speculations sometimes fly in the face of historical evidence, as in the case of Faulkner, who, as Jordan Brower has recently shown (Classical Hollywood, American Modernism, Cambridge UP, 2024), nursed public grudges against the Hollywood film industry in general and MGM Studios in particular.

A key hypothesis is that once modernist authors got over their ugly feelings, or at least managed them well enough to persist in writing plotless novels, they did so at [End Page 325] the expense of their characters. According to this account, modernist novels perpetrate egregious acts of abuse, for the authors who sought the solaces of plot in theaters deny the same to their characters. The third chapter on Faulkner, for instance, suggests that present tense narration in As I Lay Dying denotes the author's refusal to let his characters "gain traction on novelistic time" (165), and that "Faulkner acknowledges that formal departure from the realist preterit involves a certain cruelty on the part of the modernist creator toward her characters" (164). More, immiserated characters are said to militate against their creators by "jostl[ing] for consequentiality—not against other characters but against their own novels, which have given them a life defined by suffering, and against their authors…" (26). Lukács's discovery of psychopathology in modernism makes a fantastical, unexpected return, with characters coming alive to split dissociatively from their authors.

Dabashi acknowledges that to treat characters as if they were humans with intentions and feelings is to commit the "realistic fallacy" (25) but finds reasons to do so anyway. It's not strange to think that actors might be at odds with the scripted characters they perform. The next step, though, is curious:

[T]his book draws inspiration from the residue of characters' extratextuality in film so as to lean into rather than away from the realistic fallacy in literature… Losing the Plot draws on the wrongness of the realistic fallacy in literary representation because doing so helps us to recognize how these literary characters' desires differ, often radically, from what the novels they inhabit are doing formally.

(25)

An aggrieved sense of mismatch with the given world, though, is a defining feature of the novel form (n.b., again, left-Hegelian Lukács), and...