In the novel The Unconsoled (Ishiguro 1996), by British-Japanese author
Kazuo Ishiguro, the action moves towards a performance by the inter-
nationally renowned concert pianist Ryder which never actually happens.
Intersecting storylines unfold throughout, and seem to point towards a
particular end, but come to rest, not in what does happen, but in what
does not. In Paul Auster’s ‘City of Glass’ in The New York Trilogy (1988),
the central character Quinn assumes a false identity as a detective, Paul
Auster. He is employed by Peter Stillman Jnr, and his wife Virginia, to chase
Peter Stillman Snr, who Stillman Jnr believes wants to murder him. But the
chase eventually dissipates. Stillman Snr disappears, and it is never really
clear whether he was a real threat or not. At the very end, the story fades
out, the narrator claims not to know anything about Quinn’s whereabouts,
and Quinn could be alive or dead. A number of possibilities present them-
selves, but what has occurred is very uncertain. Stillman Snr may have
killed Virginia and Peter Stillman, or they may have murdered him. Or the
whole scenario may have been made up from the beginning by the Still-
mans. No outcome is necessarily more likely than another. In both cases
the novels are extremely allegorical and metaphorical.
Broadening the concept of plot does not mean losing interest in struc-
ture or shaping the story. In fact, a relatively plotless fiction will probably
require a stronger structure to keep the reader’s interest alive. There are
two main sets of possibilities here, though each has many different mani-
festations. Firstly, a plot structure can be employed but subverted, so the
story may hold our interest by seeming to work towards closure which
never actually occurs. Alternatively, other kinds of structure can be substi-
tuted for narrative structures (either partly or entirely) while still retaining
a story element if desired. The first category of strategies is the focus of the
next section, the second category is explored throughout this book and
also within Chapter 9.
PLOTTING THE PLOTLESS
In order to subvert a plotline (Exercise 1) we may need to undo some of the
normal grids of the plot, for example the causality between events and
the resolution of the outcomes. Begin by imagining a situation in which
the readers’ expectations and interest are raised but never fulfilled:
Example 7.1: Raising but not fulfilling expectations
A father receives a letter from a daughter he has never met who
was adopted as a baby. The story seems to pivot on our curiosity
about the meeting, and our expectation is that the story will endPostmodern f(r)ictions 137