Escape, Voyeurism & the Need for Literary Plot in Our Lives

I love this line: “Plot makes perverts of us all.”

Just this week I described the unusually large number of men who read Anne of Carversville. “That’s because men are voyeurs,” he responded.

Lev Grossman writes for the Wall Street Journal that “a good story is a dirty secret that we all share. It’s what makes guilty pleasures so pleasurable, but it’s also what makes them so guilty. A juicy tale reeks of crass commercialism and cheap thrills. We crave such entertainments, but we despise them.”

via WSJ, Jon KrauseModern writers abandoned plot. Life is not so tidy. Plot stories, especially those with a happy ending, are a lie. Life never ends this way, and if it does, the moment is soon lost.

In addition, we hate discipline — don’t we? Story lines reflect discipline and structure in the age of the Internet. Grossman says the literary landscape is changing, making the novel entertaining again.

The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century.

Grossman writes that this revolution comes, not from the avant-garde, but from the supermarket racks.

Perhaps we can draw a parallel with women and porn. We like plot. Ah yes, another gender discussion … but we won’t go there today. Love, Anne