{"id":82397,"date":"2015-02-04T19:36:16","date_gmt":"2015-02-05T00:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=82397"},"modified":"2015-02-05T10:55:33","modified_gmt":"2015-02-05T15:55:33","slug":"man-in-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/04\/man-in-hole\/","title":{"rendered":"Man in Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"

Turning novels\u2019 plots into data points.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"vonnegut_maninhole\"<\/a>

Kurt Vonnegut<\/p><\/div>\n

Motherboard<\/em> has a new article about Matthew Jockers<\/a>, a University of Nebraska English professor who\u2019s been studying what he calls \u201cthe relationship between sentiment and plot shape in fiction<\/a>.\u201d Jockers has crunched hard data from thousands of novels in the hope of answering two key questions: Are there any archetypal plot shapes? And if so, how many?<\/p>\n

The answers, his data suggest, are \u201cyes\u201d and \u201cabout six,\u201d respectively.<\/p>\n

Jockers, it should be clear, is pursuing a different meaning of plot<\/em> than the one we conventionally reach for\u2014he conceives of it as an emotional concern more than a narrative concern. His research was spurred by a concept called syuzhet<\/em>, one of a pair of terms coined by the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp. As Jockers explains, <\/p>\n

\n

Syuzhet<\/em> is concerned with the linear progression of narrative from beginning (first page) to the end (last page), whereas fabula<\/em> is concerned with the specific events of a story, events which may or may not be related in chronological order \u2026 When we study the syuzhet<\/em>, we are not so much concerned with the order of the fictional events but specifically interested in the manner in which the author presents those events to readers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In other words, a book\u2019s plot isn\u2019t necessarily about conflict and resolution, but emotions, which \u201cserve as proxies for the narrative movement,\u201d as Jockers writes. This is an attractive approach to plot, in part because it allows us to ascertain\u2014and to defend, if need be\u2014the \u201cplottiness\u201d of certain books that tend to be regarded as plotless. It\u2019s become conventional wisdom that plot, and the active enjoyment of it, are middlebrow pursuits, and that true literature is free from the shapely confines of narrative. This ignores that intricate, careful plotting is itself an art form, and that what makes so much \u201cliterary\u201d fiction so ungodly boring is its inept or absent plotting. But by Jockers\u2019s conception, even Waiting for Godot<\/em>, which Vivian Mercier famously and favorably described as \u201ca play in which nothing happens, twice,\u201d is positively brimming with plot: chase sequences, surround-sound explosions, incestuous love triangles.<\/p>\n

So how does Jockers get at the syuzhet<\/em>, the emotional silhouette of a book\u2019s body? He hasn\u2019t revealed all of his methodology yet, but in essence, he\u2019s using sentiment analysis<\/a>, looking at the mood and tone of writers\u2019 words\u2014specifically \u201ca controlled vocabulary of positive and negative sentiment markers \u2026 and a machine model that I trained to identify and score passages as positive or negative.\u201d<\/p>\n

I found this objectionable at first\u2014the idea that something as complex as plot could be reduced, or even partially reduced, to a list of words with emotional valences. But there are only so many words, really, and though it may seem to flatten the whole transfigured human experience, most words have a fairly straightforward sentimental value. Here\u2019s a random segment of the list of negative words<\/a> Jockers drew from, for instance:<\/p>\n

\n

pout<\/em>
poverty<\/em>
powerless<\/em>
prate<\/em>
pratfall<\/em>
prattle<\/em>
precarious<\/em>
precariously<\/em>
precipitate<\/em>
precipitous<\/em>
predatory<\/em>
predicament<\/em>
prejudge<\/em>
prejudice<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And the positive ones:<\/p>\n

\n

gallantly<\/em>
galore<\/em>
geekier<\/em>
geeky<\/em>
gem<\/em>
gems<\/em>
generosity<\/em>
generous<\/em>
generously<\/em>
genial<\/em>
genius<\/em>
gentle<\/em>
gentlest<\/em>
genuine<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jockers was inspired, too, by Kurt Vonnegut, who said in his rejected master\u2019s thesis in anthropology for the University of Chicago<\/a>, \u201cThere\u2019s no reason why the simple shapes of stories can\u2019t be fed into computers.\u201d There are probably still writers who find that statement provocative. I don\u2019t. It should be obvious to all writers that parts of \u201cthe craft\u201d are deeply schematic; if you feel threatened by a machine, there\u2019s probably something suspect about your humanism. We should resist the precious notion that there\u2019s something inimitable about the whole enterprise of storytelling. Vonnegut definitely did: he found that stories tended to have eight shapes, including a kind of U-shaped one he called Man in Hole in which \u201csomebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again.\u201d He also readily admitted that Hamlet<\/em>\u2019s shape was more or less a flat line\u2014and that it was brilliant nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Jockers\u2019s research has led him to a smaller number, six, and though he hasn\u2019t told us what those six are, you can see already that he\u2019s onto something. Here\u2019s a chart tracking the shifts in emotional valence of Joyce\u2019s Portait of the Artist<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"poa2\"<\/a>

Matthew Jockers<\/p><\/div>\n

And here\u2019s The Da Vinci Code<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"brown1\"<\/a>

Matthew Jockers<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cNotice how much more regular the fluctuations are<\/a>. This is the profile of a page turner,\u201d he writes. \u201cDan Brown never lets the plot become too troubled or too much of a downer. He baits us and teases us with fluctuating emotion.\u201d<\/p>\n

I worked briefly for a film and theater producer who liked to speak of \u201cpushing plot through\u201d a script, as if plot were a waste product excreted through the screenplay\u2019s GI tract. That makes the process, and the producer, sound crass and uncultured, but it was just the opposite: I can think of hardly anyone (certainly not most writers) who had such a sophisticated understanding of plot, who could see a story beat by beat. If yours wanted for drama, if its characters sometimes lacked motivation or some aspect of its narrative felt contrived, he could fix it, and not by cheapening or sensationalizing the plot, but by showing you, on your own terms, what the stakes really were. Tellingly, he eschewed the term plot arc<\/em>, which summons a tidy rainbow of conflict and resolution, in favor of that uglier but truer \u201cpushing plot through\u201d: what a compelling story needs isn\u2019t a clean trajectory but a healthy appetite and a good digestion.<\/p>\n

As a reader and a writer, I\u2019ve never found it easy to discuss plot; my alliances have never been clear. I have a deep admiration for writers like John le Carr\u00e9 and Richard Price, who work unashamedly in genre fiction but whose novels, in part because of their convincing, complicated plots, are elevated to literature; I also like writers whose fiction seems to verge on total plotlessness (Nicholson Baker, Renata Adler), and writers who self-consciously mock the very struts and joists of plot (Donald Barthelme, Mark Leyner). And these knee-jerk reactions are complicated by research like Jockers\u2019s, which suggests that plot is at once more subtle and more obvious than we\u2019d expect\u2014less a product of preconceived conflict and more indebted to a writer\u2019s style and characters. Never has the question \u201cWhat happens in it?\u201d been more vexed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to mock what have emerged as the digital humanities, because they seem to partake of a lust for data, of data for data\u2019s sake, that feels at the moment like an unseemly trend. But anyone who asks what use these charts could possibly have, what \u201cpractical value,\u201d has already fallen into the trap that students of the humanities are supposed to avoid. Jockers (and others like Ben Schmidt, who has a fascinating analysis of the structures underlying thousands of TV and movie scripts<\/a>) have already gotten us to ask questions about the foundations of plot\u2014about what a plot is<\/em>, even. I\u2019ve come out of his work feeling that I know even less than I knew before: the mechanisms of storytelling are more ambiguous than ever. That in itself gives his work value.<\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Turning novels\u2019 plots into data points. Motherboard has a new article about Matthew Jockers, a University of Nebraska English professor who\u2019s been studying what he calls \u201cthe relationship between sentiment and plot shape in fiction.\u201d Jockers has crunched hard data from thousands of novels in the hope of answering two key questions: Are there any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[16906,17,8073,71,3020,16905,16907],"class_list":["post-82397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-archetypes","tag-books","tag-data","tag-fiction","tag-kurt-vonnegut","tag-matthew-jockers","tag-plots"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCan a Novel\u2019s Plot Be Reduced to Data Points?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"New research suggests that plots have only six archetypal shapes. 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