a small segment of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights
If someone accuses a story of being plotless, there's a good chance I'll like it. To be clear, I also enjoy stories with conventional plots. I just think we could use more so-called plotless stories that don’t ride the rollercoaster of Freytag’s pyramid.
Additionally, you might be interested in the ongoing debate concerning contemporary Western notions of plot. At the bottom of this article, I'll include links to some resources for reading more about diverse and non-Western plot structures. It's a fascinating topic! I would love to be pointed to stories and novels that operate against these biases if anyone wants to send me some recommendations. Also, it might interest you to know that the Freytag of pyramid fame (remembered more for his pyramid than his stories), was a Prussian supremacist and anti-Semite. I’m not saying the pyramid is guilty by association! But I do think that rigid attempts to define “good art” can burble up from wells of racism and ethnocentrism and classism, even when we don’t recognize it.
For now, I'm going to focus on one type of arguably plotless story I love, wherein a befuddled protagonist explores a surreal landscape.
My love for this kind of story probably began with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Alice isn't purposely adventuring…she's lost. She has the goal of returning home, but she gets so wrapped up in the petty dramas of the Wonderland inhabitants, it doesn't seem like she's trying that hard to escape. However anxious she feels as she explores the contours of this dreamscape, her curiosity spurs her on. In fact, the story often points out its own lack of meaning through words that only sound meaningful. The rhythms of Jabberwocky impress us, but Humpty Dumpty’s translation is clearly off-the-cuff. The Duchess claims there is a moral to everything if one can only find it, but she also immerses her baby in pepper and beats him when he sneezes, so she isn’t especially reliable. Alice doesn’t become a better person for her adventures; her success is simply in observing and surviving the funny hell of Wonderland. Kind of like The Dude, she abides.
The more I’m able to see life itself as a strange space to be explored, the happier I am. It helps to find artists who see the world as a museum of marvelous things. I wish I could be that kind of life-affirming person, though I’m afraid I focus too much on the horrible things.
Sometimes venturing through a surreal or merely strange landscape leads to what you could call character development, and sometimes not. Some of my favorite kinds of stories involve minimal character development. I also enjoy stories where the characters grow, but I grow bored when it happens in every story. I’m no stickler for realism, but it’s hard for me to believe in a world where everyone keeps getting kinder and stronger all the time. That’s not the world I know.
But excuse my complaints! I’ll move on to Kafka, a great maestro of creating surreal environments and persistently foolish protagonists. Many of his stories involve a confused protagonist trying to make sense of something illogical (much like Alice asking questions in Wonderland), and The Trial and The Castle are two novel-length examples. In these novels, the landscapes aren’t super trippy (a never-ending courtroom in The Trial and a dingy town in The Castle), and yet the protagonists of these stories act kind of like Link in The Legend of Zelda when he walks around and asks villagers where he can find a magic sword. Except instead of magic swords, these protagonists need proper documentation. There isn’t a steady build-up in these novels, but rather a sense of forever wandering. The only escape is death (though it seems that in The Castle, the protagonist might already be dead).
In the family tree of Kafka is Haruki Murakami. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to attempt fiction-writing if I hadn’t read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I loved exploring the weird spaces of this novel, from the ragged neighborhood lawns to the foreboding well to the alternate reality found within the well (the hotel with an ample supply of Cutty Sark). He pulls a similar trick in nearly all his books, and it never gets old to me. I also enjoyed walking the fairy tale streets of his End of the World and the perilous sewers of his Hard-Boiled Wonderland. And on and on. It would be hard to call his stories plotless, and yet…when you’re exploring a new world, you don’t always go neatly from least to greatest threat. Sometimes you have to stop to make spaghetti or chase Colonel Sanders.
Heavily-plotted stories seem to rely on strong protagonist desires. It brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s old advice that “Every character must want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” But do you always know what you want when you’re traveling? You think you want to see the Eiffel Tower and eat a croissant, but when you get to Paris, everything smells so sweet and looks so interesting, you don’t know where to start. One thing most Murakami protagonists have in common is that they aren’t sure what they want, and I think they also have this in common with most people. Even if we never leave our hometowns, we’re always exploring the shifting and baffling landscape of our own desires. People and buildings and opportunities come and go. One year we enlist as soldiers, and the next we call ourselves pacifists. We are always leaving something or someone and encountering something new. My grandfather was a postal worker, and he said he’d have to wake up so early for work, he wouldn’t even know if he should have called in sick until noon. It took that long to shake off the sleepiness to know how he felt. Sometimes it takes years to figure out how we feel about a thing. Sometimes it takes a lifetime.
Other examples of surreal explorations? Kelly Link comes to mind as a writer who will set a story in a truly weird place and take the time to explore the nooks and crannies. Helen Oyeyemi is always going somewhere strange and incredible, with details that always surprise me. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled is a book about a pianist who is supposed to give a performance in a reality-defying, unnamed European city.
I’ve written multiple stories about someone exploring a surreal space, and I hope to write more. “Free Museum of the New Art” in Potomac Review is about a woman visiting a menacing art museum in another country. Another is a story published in Vastarien called “Picturing Her Hands,” about a woman who has been confined to her husband’s estate for some time but is forced to venture into the town to find someone to remove the tattoos that have appeared on her hands overnight. Set to be featured in next year’s Monstrous Futures anthology, I also have a story where someone explores a death-themed virtual reality mall. I wrote these stories without a plan because I wanted to go on my own explorations.
But please give me more examples! Leave me your recommendations for stories about someone exploring a strange landscape, with bonus points for lack of clear rising action and climax.
On diverse story structures:
https://nelsonagency.com/2022/01/kishotenketsu-and-non-western-story-structures/
https://themillions.com/2022/08/culture-shock-reassessing-the-workshop.html
Really thought-provoking points, Ivy. I want to read more examples of protagonists who think they want something and find out those desires have shifted. As you point out, very much like life.
You've got me thinking.
I think my personal favorite, ahem, "vibe" stories come from Erin Morgenstern, who is immaculate at crafting a world and uninterested at a conflict, especially so on her latest novel, The Starless Sea. Piranesi by Suzanne Clark also fits this, in my opinion - half of that slim novel is simply concerned with the world before it turns the concern with the titular Piranesi himself. It's refreshing to read that sort of thing - to, for once, simply exist in the world, rather than hurled from moment to moment in a formulaic fashion.
Anime and manga have a rich history of characters content, or learning to accept all the ups and downs of, living. The concept is known as "mono no aware". Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (better enjoyed as a manga) and the Aria series (Aria the Animation, Aria the Natural, Aria the Origination) are two shining examples of this type of storytelling, both set in futuristic worlds with quite peculiar characters. I've also heard great things about Mushishi as well in that regard!