Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design
Marie-Laure Ryan
Narrative, Volume 17, Number 1, January 2009, pp. 56-75 (Article)
Published by The Ohio State University Press
DOI:
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https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.0.0016
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256471
Marie-Laure Ryan is Scholar in Residence in the English department at the University of Colorado,
Boulder. Her interests cover narrative in both traditional and new media. She edited, together with David
Herman and Manfred Jahn, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005), and is the author
of Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (1991), Narrative as Virtual Reality:
Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001), and Avatars of Story: Narrative
Modes in Old and New Media (2006).
NARRATIVE, Vol. 17, No. 1 (January 2009)
Copyright 2009 by The Ohio State University
Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes,
and Narrative Design
In narrative, plot exists on two levels: the plotting of the author, who creates the
storyline; and the plotting of the characters, who set goals, devise plans, schemes and
conspiracies, and try to arrange events to their advantage. The plotting of both author
and characters is meant to exercise control: for the author, control over the reader,
who must undergo a certain experience; for the characters, control over other char-
acters and over the randomness of life. But sometimes the goals of the author are at
odds with the goals of characters. The author needs to make the characters take par-
ticular actions to produce a certain effect on the reader, such as intense suspense, cu-
riosity, or emotional involvement; but acting toward this situation defies narrative
logic, because is not in the best interest of the characters, or not in line with their per-
sonality. In this article I propose to investigate two types of aesthetically deficient
plot twists that arise from this conflict between author and character goals. One in-
volves an active intervention by the author, an attempt to fix the problem through
hackneyed devices; I call this “cheap plot tricks” (henceforth CPT). The other results
from ignoring the problem, or covering it up, a strategy (or omission) that leads to
what is known among film writers as “plot holes” (henceforth PH). Through this em-
phasis on the kind of events that makes the sophisticated reader groan, I will be
breaking away from the almost exclusively descriptive tradition of both classical and
postclassical narratology, and I will adopt an evaluative stance closer to the prescrip-
tive spirit of Aristotle’s Poetics.
Marie-Laure Ryan
In his treatment of tragedy Aristotle sketches a catalog of good and bad ways to
construct plot. He posits as pivotal to the tragic plot two types of event: reversal of
fortune and scenes of recognition (anagnorisis), through which characters pass from
ignorance to knowledge. (Plots are even better when both events occur at the same
time, as in Oedipus Rex.) In Aristotle’s examples of inferior plotting, recognition is
achieved by means of tell-tale objects and external tokens, such as the scar on
Ulysses’ face that reveals his identity, or they are “contrived by the poet” (Poetics
26); in truly artistic plotting, recognition is brought by inferences drawn by the char-
acters, by memory, or, in the best case, it arises “from the events themselves,” this is
to say, from actions that are probable within the circumstances set up by the plot. A
prime example of this kind of motivation is Oedipus’s decision to launch an investi-
gation of the murder of his father, and discovering as a result that he is the culprit.
One can generalize from these examples that good plots are propelled by the inner
disposition of characters and by their logical reasoning, while bad ones are steered
by ad hoc external circumstances which bear the stamp of the author’s fabrication. A
CPT is an event that is poorly prepared, that looks forced, that seems to be borrowed
ready-made from a bag of tricks and whose function for the plot as a whole is too ob-
vious; in short, it is a narrative cliché. This is why I call it a plot trick rather than a
plot twist.
The vulnerability of an evaluative stance lies in the subjectivity of the readers’
judgment. What I label a CPT, you may find very acceptable. If what passes as cheap
was entirely a matter of personal judgment, it would make no sense to attempt a tax-
onomy of CPTs: every type of event could be used for good or bad plotting, depend-
ing on the reader’s opinion of the skills of the author. The opposite stance consists of
saying that that there are some kinds of events which represent bad plotting, no mat-
ter what the context is. A compromise can be achieved between the relativism of the
first position and the essentialism of the second by regarding some plot twists as in-
herently cheap, while recognizing that they can be redeemed by being put in the ser-
vice of a good story. But the most favorable reaction these plot twists will elicit is to
be judged “excusable,” that is, to be assigned to the valleys and not the peaks in the
contour of the plot.
In the reader’s aesthetic evaluation, plotting devices range on a continuum from
cheap to brilliant, with a middle occupied by events that do not provoke strong reac-
tions. In this article I will focus on CPTs and PHs rather than on brilliant plot twists
(BPTs), because their identification, having to do with faulty logic, implausibility, or
a sense of déjà vu is much less dependent on the reader’s personal taste, and they are
therefore much easier to collect and classify. Unlike CPTs, BPTs are deliberately
created effects that do not follow a fixed formula, cannot be repeated without losing
their punch, and require a much more specialized environment. This is not to say that
BPTs do not present common features—if they did not, they would be totally imper-
meable to narrative theory. But while they aim at the standard narrative effects of
suspense, curiosity and surprise, and rely on proven principles of efficient narrative
design, such as sudden turn, anagnorisis, or directing the reader’s suspicion toward
the wrong character, their brilliance resides in a unique contextualization of these
features which can only be studied individually. Eventually, a theory of plot design
Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design 57
will have to collect readers’ personal examples of BPTs, and investigate the princi-
ples that produce these effects; but it is much easier to start the theory with the weeds
of the narrative flora than with the rare flowers whose sighting constitutes a memo-
rable event. For the weeds, too, are narrative species from which we can learn some-
thing about plot design.
CHEAP PLOT TRICKS
The most productive (if I may say so) source of CPTs is the disregard of what
Aristotle’s regards as the function of the poet, namely, “not to say what has happened
but to say the kind of thing that would happen, i.e. what is possible in accordance
with probability and necessity” (Poetics 5.5, 16). Most of my examples of CPTs in-
volve coincidence, which, by definition, is a phenomenon of low probability, since it
is the product of an accidental intersection between two independent causal chains
(Richardson 26). The degree of probability of a coincidence is inversely proportional
to the size of the pool of events that are possible in a certain situation; hence the
“small world” effect when the coincidence occurs: it is as if a large world had
shrunk, leaving fewer possibilities. As Hilary Dannenberg has shown in her fascinat-
ing book Convergence and Divergence: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fic-
tion, narrative has never really outgrown the plot device of coincidence. If we
decided to expurgate events of low probability in the name of artistic plotting, we
would deprive ourselves of the main source of tellability, namely the report of un-
usual situations, and very few stories would survive. But our tolerance toward extra-
ordinary coincidence has grown lower through the ages, as the demand for realism
has grown higher. Few of us are still fascinated by the highly contrived tales of ship-
wrecks and reunion of long lost lovers that delighted readers in the Renaissance and
Baroque periods. This evolution in taste explains why so many of my examples will
come from the 17th century; but nowadays, CPTs are still widely found in popular
culture, especially in film.
CPT 1: Extraordinary coincidence: being at the right place at the right time
My first example of CPT, from Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves,
ignited a memorable literary controversy. Shortly after publication, in 1678, the peri-
odical Le Mercure Galant asked readers to express their opinion of this particular
episode. The question generated a storm of responses that anticipates the lively dis-
cussions of books, movies and videogames that one finds today on the Internet.
Mademoiselle de Chartres, a virtuous young beauty, arrives at the court of
Henri II, King of France. The Prince de Clèves falls in love with her and asks
for her hand. The princess, who has no experience of love, accepts, despite her
lack of special feelings for him. After the wedding, she meets M. de Nemours,
the most eligible bachelor at the court, and they fall instantly and passionately
in love. But Mme de Clèves is determined to fight her passion, and she never
58 Marie-Laure Ryan
gives evidence of her love to Nemours. To avoid temptation, she retreats to her
country house. Nemours learns about her whereabouts and goes hunting in the
area. He gets lost, and suddenly finds himself near a pavilion on the Clèves es-
tate. Soon the princess and her husband walk by and sit on a bench right in front
of him. From his hiding place, Nemours hears the princess confess to her hus-
band that she is in love with another man, and that she needs to stay away from
him. Though she never names the object of her love, the ecstatic Nemours un-
derstands through circumstantial evidence that he is the one she has in mind.
(331–36)
The focus of the controversy was not, as one would expect, the presence of Nemours
on the scene, but the fact that Mme de Clèves confesses her love for another man to
her husband, when nothing forces her to do so, since she is not guilty of any infi-
delity. According to the contemporary responses (Goldsmith 1998), the majority of
readers believed that no woman in her right mind would make such a confession.
Today’s readers are much more understanding of Mme de Clèves’ action, because it
is well prepared within the text, both through the character of the heroine and
through certain declarations of M. de Clèves that suggest his appreciation of honesty.
But if my response is typical, modern readers are troubled by the highly improbable
spatial and temporal convergence of life paths that allows M. de Nemours to be pre-
sent on the scene and to eavesdrop on Mme de Clèves’ confession. Lagarde and
Michard, authors of a popular textbook of French literature, call it “an artifice qui
nous gène aujourd’hui” (“an artifice that bothers us today” [362]).
The artifice of the overheard confession allowed Mme de Lafayette to solve a
thorny design problem. She wanted her heroine to be consumed by love, but she also
wanted her to maintain the highest moral standards. These standards prevented the
princess from giving any deliberate sign of love to M. de Nemours. On the other
hand, the plot could not proceed toward its tragic conclusion (and celebration of
Mme de Clèves’ fortitude) without M. de Nemours acquiring firm knowledge of the
private feelings of Mme de Clèves. The CPT not only solves the problem of the
transmission of information from a private to a public domain (for Nemours will
gossip about it, creating a rumor that will eventually reach the unfortunate husband),
it also kills two birds with one stone by awakening in M. de Clèves a jealousy that
will make him die of a broken heart, through the literalized metaphor of another
CPT. This death makes his widow free to accept M. de Nemours marriage proposal,
but for a secret reason which has been variously interpreted as guilt, heroic self-con-
trol, resistance to social pressures, exceptional character or fear of love, the princess
turns down her suitor, and chooses instead a life of penitence.
The episode of the overheard confession blatantly serves the interests of the
story and the goals of the author at the expense of verisimilitude. It was also in the
name of verisimilitude that seventeenth century readers criticized Mme de Clèves’
action, though they did not object to the presence of Nemours. The standards obvi-
ously differ: for the seventeenth century reader (as for Aristotle), verisimilitude
meant integrity of character and conformity with an idea of human nature, while for
the modern reader, who has been taught to distrust this notion, and consequently
Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design 59