Plot and subplot plotted

The Veneerings Dinner, by Sol Eytinge

“Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares. O mighty Shares! To set those blaring images so high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out, night and day, 'Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, and fatten on us'!”

--Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

I'm now going to throw a passel of two-dollar words at you just to work toward an idea that's rather simple. Forgive me, that's the way my mind works, like a popcorn machine-- when it works at all. It's usually because I'm trying to convince myself of what I'm saying. I'm rarely preaching to the choir even when I'm talking to myself.

We're going to start with Cartesian coordinates, the x and y axes. We're going to label the x axis, the horizontal, plot. We'll call the y axis, the vertical, subplot. Or we could just as easily designate them as melody and harmony. Or to borrow the language of semiotics, syntagm and paradigm, which should give us a little more room to work in. What are those rooms?

Syntagm

A syntagm ascribes meaning in terms of word sequence in a sentence. For instance:"The cat ate the rat" and "the rat ate the cat" have very different meanings due to the repositioning of words in the chain. Of course, it's not too often that rats eat cats. Lets try something more subtle.  When"After the cat ate the rat, he threw up"  becomes "He threw up after the cat ate the rat", the "antecedent for "he" becomes murky. Whereas "when the sun goes down, the lights come on" and "the lights come on when the sun goes down" are interchangeable.

Paradigm

Clara Peters, Still Life of Fish and Cat

On the other hand, the paradigmatic y axis ascribes meaning in terms of words that can be substituted for one another:

"The cat ate the fish" can be substituted for "the cat ate the rat," but "the cat ate the was" cannot. Of course, these are substitutions bound by syntax, the grammatical structure of a sentence. This can lead us to Chomsky's famous example:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

--which is syntactically beautiful, but semantically gibberish. What we need for our purposes is an overlay of semantic substitution. Thus "the cat ate the salmon" would be a substitute, whereas "the cat ate the robin" would not.

Meanwhile, Then

Think of syntagm as an outfit--shirt, pants, socks, shoes. A concatenation.

A paradigm is a shoe closet. Structural substitutions only.

Now let's expand on this: plot is through-line, melodic, sequential. Plot elements can be introduced with THEN. Plot is time. 

Subplot is paradigmatic, harmonic, simultaneous. Subplot elements are introduced with with MEANWHILE.  Subplot is rhythm, also known as the all-important element of writing: voice. 

We can look at it as two groupings. On the one side is the x axis: plot/syntagm/melody/information/time/combination/sequence/solo/monody. On the other is subplot/paradigm/ harmony/repetition/differentiation/pattern/echo/polyphony.

The Zero Point

And what is the zero point on the graph? Where x and y intersect? Story. Plot and subplot  provide story with a frame for the picture, a glove for the hand; story provides a plot with purpose, with a vector. This is because the zero point is also the intersection with the z axis, which measures depth--otherwise known as theme. 

What is theme? It's the questions raised by the story. What the story's about. (The writer may elect to answer those questions, too, but he runs the risk of of didacticism.) A writer may deny theme but it will always creep back in, if not in what the writer says, then in what they don't say. Theme provides consonance--or at times intentional dissonance in order to create tension and surprise in the music--the structural syntax of story. 

Our Mutual Friend

Let's see how this works in Our Mutual Friend. Why that book in particular, Dickens's last but for the unfinished Edwin Drood? Nobody's ever even heard of it. It's large and unwieldy and full of cardboard characters. First, because Dickens is my favorite author. Second, because it's my favorite Dickens. Third, because it's oozing with subplots, and all on the same theme: money, status, and corruption. Each character is tested by fortune, or the loss of it.

(Although we might just as easily plump for Love Actually as an example, which probably has as many subplots. In that instance it's the old theme of love thwarted and obstacles overcome, this time through the magic of Christmas--or airports, I'm not sure which.)

Our Mutual Friend  could be justly accused of having no one protagonist, unless it be Society with a capital S. The titular protagonist, John Harmon, our mutual friend, who trails two aliases behind him, acts as a a mirror for us to view others' faults and virtues. He is the heir to a vast fortune--based on trash. Literally. But he is out of the game, ostensibly having drowned at the outset of our tale. He has renounced his legacy, understanding it for the yoke it is.

Society is a whirlpool, ceaselessly dragging the unwary down to ruin. Floating at its still center of the whirlpool is the lawyer Mortimer Lightwood, executor of Harmon's father's will, who acts as narrator to the  assembled glitterati at dinner parties given by the Veneerings, who are rising, always rising--until their sudden downfall. 

The myriad plots span the lowest rungs of society--Gaffer Hexam, who earns his living by robbing the corpses of drowned men--to the highest, or at least those who aspire to be the highest, the nouveau riche Veneerings. But then everyone aspires to the highest, or the veneer of it. Here's the heroine, Bella Wilfer:

“I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can't beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it.”

It will be Harmon's task to convince her otherwise, while he bears witness to the simple Mr. Boffin, the golden dustman, who has inherited the Harmon fortune, descend into the depths of miserliness.

Society is a whirlpool, but it can be a baptismal font as well.  Both Harmon and Wrayburn, the second hero, drown and are born again. Salvation lies in the renunciation of wealth as a barometer of worth, which means a renunciation of Society. As the villain Rogue Ryder reasons:

“Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? 'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse's? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it? Don't try to go confounding the rights and wrongs of things in that way. But it's worthy of the sneaking spirit that robs a live man.”

There is nothing without a price in this Society. Silas Wegg hungers for the money to complete himself, literally. He hopes to buy back his amputated leg from Mr. Venus, the taxidermist. Everything has its price, and even the human is body sold in job lots.

Manipulation of identity, especially through and for money is a strong complimentary theme. There is Fledgeby, who conceals his career as a moneylender behind his employee Mr. Riah--a  veritable sheep in Shylock's clothing. There are The Lammles, who marry each other for money, find out that neither has any, and live in the teeth of ruin, preying on a naive young heiress. Identity is fluid, transactional as when Veneering introduces the befuddled Mr. Twemlow to two new characters--or caricatures:

“He then begs to make his dear Twemlow known to his two friends, Mr. Boots and Mr. Brewer - and clearly has no distinct idea which is which.”

Indeed, a great swath of the characters who populate this tale could be mistaken for mere dolls. To drive that point home, Dickens introduces Jenny Wren, the doll's dressmaker, who drapes her creations in only the finest clothes.

The Moral of the Story

So what's the point of this blizzard of terminology? Three conclusions occur to me, three possibly important ideas: 

1. These voices, these plots, must all sing together, some harmonically, others contrapuntally, still others dissonantly.  
2. Thematic structure (the questions raised by the work) dictates subplots, just  as syntactic structure dictates the through-line of the plot. 
3. The wealth of stories mankind has to tell are at their heart syntagmatic substitutions. 

And...and that plot on its surface may seem smooth as the mirrored surface of a pond. But throw an inciting incident like a pebble into the water and the waves ripple outward indefinitely a the pebble sinks down through subplot after subplot.

That's the way I figure it, anyhow.