Who Needs Plot?

On Olga Tokarczuk's 'House of Day, House of Night'

As a young reader I wanted antics and blood. Baseball, kickball, sledding in the winter, swimming in the summer, smashing anthills on my bike, TV, NES: that pretty much sums up my childhood. I struggled to pay attention in school, so when I did read I needed the pull of intensity, high-octane plots, and heebie-jeebies—that, or I needed the slapstick and absurdity of comics. I turned to Calvin and Hobbes and trashy horror novels purportedly aimed at future Stephen King readers. Part of me curls with jealousy when a literary biography tells of a childhood full of books and summers spent wading through Middlemarch, but another part of me is glad for what I was given. Every media choice felt genuine and guilt-free. There were no shoulds, no such thing as a canon of literature nor required reading. Free time was free time, and you just leaned into it without much thought. I think a lot of my adult reading life has been spent trying to recapture that feeling, one of intuitive choosing and unselfconscious absorption.

Naturally, I grew out of antics and blood, but I still obsess about what holds a book together, what keeps me turning the pages. Though it’s always changing, I guess you could say I’ve been thinking about this idea—what holds a work of fiction together, what gives it octane—for more than thirty years. I’ve collected theories on plot, studied tension, charted structures, and drawn wacky diagrams in the backs of many books. I tried to answer this question of urgency a few years back when I taught a class on 13 Ways of Looking at Plot, where we took apart “plotless” stories, unconventional stories, slice-of-life stories, and some conventionally-plotted stories and tried to figure out what, exactly, held them together, but more importantly, what kept us reading.

Freytag’s Pyramid, the three-act structure, the Fichtean Curve, the hero’s journey, the seven-point structure, the snowflake method—they all essentially describe the same thing. Janet Burroway’s succinct formula from her seminal Writing Fiction—plot = desire + danger to achieving that desire—pretty much sums it up. Something puts pressure on a character or characters, the character in turn either wants something or wants to get out of a sticky situation, tensions escalate, problems arise, until the events come to a climax, wherein there is some sort of resolution and/or change within the main character or characters. Yearning, in other words, drives story—yearning and motivation. Without those, no story.

I thought about yearning a lot while reading Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (1998) recently. The novel, a roving portrait of Silesia—a region once part of Poland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia—is confounding, quirky, pseudo-spiritual, earthy, and at times wrenching. The narrator doesn’t reveal much about herself, other than the fact that she is married to R. and they moved to the town of Nowa Ruda a few years prior. They live in relative peace and sometimes go whole days without speaking. The narrator, more interested in listening, hosts people for tea, but restricts herself to single words, grunts, and clipped speech. “Tea?” “Welcome.” “Hello.” She’s preoccupied with mushrooms, reading about others peoples’ dreams on the internet, and with her enigmatic neighbor Marta. Together, they gossip and collect stories of the town.

The book is divided into short sections, featuring sketches and vignettes of past and present inhabitants of Nowa Ruda. Marta may or may not be a mushroom, she may have Alzheimer’s, or she just might be the eccentric old woman next door who sleeps only a few hours every night and makes wigs. Whatshisname is a loner and tells a story of how he witnessed a neighbor boy grow up in the shadow of his abusive father, only to drink himself to death. Krysia hears a mysterious voice of a man named Amos and tries to track him down in real life. Kummernis, a hermaphroditic saint, strikes away from the kingdom as a young girl, refusing to fall into arranged marriage. She works miracles, and eventually her face grows into the likeness of Christ. Years later, a young monk named Paschalis writes her story from a cell in the farm building of a convent. He has escaped his own abusive past, and he yearns to become a woman. There is a heartbreaking story of a couple, “evacuees from the east,” who don’t want children and quietly go about their days, content to collect nice furniture and fashionable clothing, until one day she is stricken with cancer, and they both engage in secretive affairs.

I suppose you could finish all these sketches and say they don’t adhere to any western preconception of plot—there’s no overarching squeeze, no pressurized container, no “inciting incident” or escalating tension. Instead, each anecdote and vignette contains morsels of these elements within themselves. You can imagine another writer “upping the stakes,” where the narrator has received a book contract and is writing the book of sketches we are reading, creating a deadline or sense of urgency. Or another plot might be that there’s a comet heading right for the town, and all these stories must be collected and preserved as quickly as possible to preserve the memory of this village. But as is, the book begs co-creation. What are we to make of all the loose threads? The organizing principle is left for us to decipher. There are many plots, but they are self-contained and occasional. And some characters roam about in quietude, doling out folk wisdom and hypothesizing about the label on a bottle of wine. The narrator—what does she want, other than to collect stories? She wants to learn of dreams, to cook mushrooms, to listen. That yearning might not be high-octane, but it does feel organic, true to life, and true to the organizing principle of the book.

The vision feels large to me, and one I can’t quite reconcile myself to just yet—and that’s exactly why I’m OK with its overarching plotlessness. It takes time for books to reveal the strength and nature of their foundation, just like houses take time to reveal their quirks and distinctions. The house of day is the house that lets in the sunlight, that welcomes the breeze, and provides a stomping ground for squirrels and birds. The house at night creaks, moans, and lets loose its ghosts. The house of day is for work. The house of night is for rest. The house of day has something to say. The house of night gets lost in the enchantments and discombobulations of dreams.

At one point in the book, the narrator dreams about getting a card in the mail that reads, “Wake Up!” She stops reading, but wonders what might’ve come after. Perhaps it was “Poland is teetering on the brink” or an offer for a pack of narcissus bulbs. “All I remember is that I opened it [the envelope] with a knife, like all the other letters, and now every knife is associated in my mind with that ‘Wake up’ call, and always will be, I think, and with the act of slicing open the flat body of a folded piece of paper, disembowelling a paper animal in order to get at its prophetic, meaningful entrails.”

House of Day, House of Night stands firmly on what it is—a roving portrait deeply rooted in a place that is torn, war-torn, and reverberating with all the accompanying mysticism, confusion, and yearning. Tokarczuk populates her novel with reverberations. “Half of life takes place in the dark,” one section begins, and it might very well speak to the narrator’s fixation with mushrooms, to the silent suffering of those who’ve seen war and hard times, or to the future reader of this book. Urgency arises not from big bangs or high-speed chases, but from the courage to not look away. As Marta says to the narrator at one point, “If death were nothing but bad, people would stop dying immediately.”

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Unfortunately, this book is out of print, which is surprising given Tokarczuk’s Nobel status. If you’re feeling especially eager, though, you can find a copy here.

Do you have any books that have delighted you and mystified you at the same time? I’d love to hear about them. Thanks for reading.