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Updated: April 30, 2025
"We should never have come." Shelby caught her fingers in a reassuring squeeze. "Don't you worry," he enjoined. "This isn't the Grand Opera House of New Babylon." Perceiving that other men smoked, Shelby lit a cigar, and as the plotless play began to unfold its tuneful fooling Mrs. Hilliard forgot to be apprehensive.
It was about time for the four-o'clock train. After all, I wonder if it is worth telling, such a simple, plotless record of a young girl's life, made up of Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays, like yours or mine. Sharley was so exactly like other people! How can it be helped that nothing remarkable happened to her? But you would like the story? It was about time for the four-o'clock train, then.
Especially, essentially, in love: love, which has its origin in Dream, its acme in Ecstasy, and its catastrophe in Disillusion: love, which is life's core and kernel and epitome, the focus and quintessence of existence. A life that is without it has somehow missed its mark: it is meaningless and plotless, "a string of casual episodes, like a bad tragedy." For what, after all, is Love?
It was the desperation of one in mortality who wanted something for his short time on the planet. And of art, what was it actually? It was not so much a reflection of the self in still waters as a reflection of something deeper sensed in the rhythms of the falling rain and the movements of fictional others in plotless lives plodding along as his was.
All her novels are prophetic of what was long to rule, in their slight framework of fable; the handling of the scenes by the way, the characterization, the natural dialogue, the vraisemblance of setting, the witty irony of observation, these are the elements of interest. Jane Austen's plots are mere tempests in tea-pots; yet she does not go to the extreme of the plotless fiction of the present.
"Things never happen in real life," she observed plaintively; "only romances have plots where things work out. But we people in real life, we just go on and on in a badly constructed, plotless sort of way with no villains, no interesting situations, no climaxes, no ensemble.
"I didn't know that there could be so much pleasure without incident. Ah, a quaint and plotless people, Mr. Reverend." "There may be more plot than you think, ma'm. These folks all have their troubles. And on the hill-side where you see the white flower, blood runs sometimes. Uncle Jasper and I are about the last of our race last of the men folks. Most of us have been killed."
In Tristram Shandy, as in the Sermons, there is a sufficiency of wit, and considerably more than a sufficiency of humorous reflection, innuendo, and persiflage; but it is the actors in his almost plotless drama who have established their creator in his niche in the Temple of Fame.
The opinion of Coleridge that the "Oedipus Tyrannus," "The Alchemist" and "Tom Jones" are "the three most perfect plots ever planned" is a curious comment upon his conception of fiction, since few stories have been more plotless than Fielding's best book. The fact is, biographical fiction like this is to be judged by itself, it has its own laws of technique.
The unexpected always happened in it, and there was both grief and laughter in its pages. It did not end quite well or quite badly, or, rather it had no end, and deep down underneath the plotless story, only peeping up now and again when the actors were troubled, there ran a vein of real sorrow and sad, unchanging love.
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