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who, starting out at the beginning of the book, must all willy-nilly reach the end to contribute their mite to the dénouement . . .'' it would be better not to fix the characters too firmly in the story, since, "as they are not an essential accompaniment of the abstract moral idea upon which the work turns, they may be abandoned half-way, as the opportunity offers itself or the logical sequence of events demands."
11 Hence the author is free to switch the reader's attention and to transfer the main thread of the story from one character to another. Bory calls this type of novel (which shows a multiplicity, rather than a unity, of time, place, and action) centrifugal and sees it as a typical example of the serial novel, which by reason of its piecemeal publication, is forced to keep the reader's interest alive from week to week or from day to day. But it is not only a question of a natural adaptation of the novel structure to the conditions peculiar to a particular genre (within which differentiations might also be made according to the particular type of serial publication adopted). The determining influence of the market goes deeper than this. As Bory also observed, "success prolongs the novels." New episodes are invented one after another, because the public claims that it cannot bear to say good-bye to its characters. A dialectic is established between market demands, and the plot's structure is so important that at a certain point even fundamental laws of plot construction, which might have been thought inviolate for any commercial novel, are transgressed. |
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Whether the plot describes a constant curve or shows a sinusoidal structure, the essential features of a story as enumerated by Aristotle in the Poetics remain unchanged: beginning, tension, climax, denouement, catharsis. The most one can say of the sinusoidal structure is that it is the product of an amalgamation of several plots, a problem which had already been discussed by the theorists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the first masters of French structural criticism.12 So strong is the psychological need felt by the reader for this tension-resolution dialectic that the worst kind of serial story ends by producing false tensions and false denouements. In Le Forgeron de la Cour-Dieu by Ponson du Terrail, for instance, there are about ten cases of fictitious recognitions, in the sense that the reader's expectations are built up only to be revealed to him facts he already knew but which were unknown to one particular character. By contrast, in Les Mystères something else happenssomething quite staggering: Rodolphe, lamenting his lost daughter, meets the prostitute Fleur-de-Marie; is she Rodolphe's daughter?an excellent theme on which to ring the changes for page after page and a subject which Sue himself must have considered the mainspring of his whole book. But abruptly, in part 2, chapter 15, scarcely a fifth of the way through the whole book, Sue, seeing that the reader will have guessed that Fleur-de-Marie is Rodolphe's daughter, comes to a decision and |
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