Lies!

Robert L. Belknap, Plots

Columbia University Press, 165pp, £22.00, ISBN 9780231541473

reviewed by Andre van Loon

'Keep right on lying to me. That’s what I want you to do.'
– Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

People lie. White lies, amusing lies, horrid lies. Sometimes you might think the liar didn’t know any better. Or that the truth was difficult to tell. Often, trauma victims have a poor recollection of what happened; eyewitnesses to historical events veer away from the official story. There are liars who take pleasure in embellishing a story, sharpening its outlines, heightening the drama, putting themselves at the centre. Paltry reality is cast aside for a better version, something worth the effort. More dangerously, there are the deceivers, the mendacious few, who lie to mislead.

To Slavic scholar Robert L. Belknap, ‘lying is a wonderful activity.’ His theory of literary plot, which he applies with surprising brevity to Shakespeare’s King Lear and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment – about 30 pages for each of these monumental works; Belknap seems to be polemicising against the graphomania of so many literary theorists – is essentially a philosophy of the lie.

Lying . . . is as creative as sex and is as human as you are. . . The argument can be made that a human being can make only one statement that is undeniable and unquestionable. No one can say ‘I am’, or ‘I am not’, or ‘I know’, or ‘I know not’, or ‘I cogitate’, or ‘Atoms fall in space’, or ‘God is omnipotent’ or ‘God is good’, or ‘God is dead’, or ‘Good and evil strive’, or ‘I have will’, or any other thing without arousing doubts in one quarter or another. But one rock we can stand upon beyond all questioning: ‘I am a liar’

As this passage makes clear, Belknaps disdains intellectual obscurity. He addresses anyone who might want to listen: he sounds more like an opinionated newspaper columnist than the academic specialist he is. He is fascinated by the ways in which plots – themselves of course fictional – are human because they involve incomplete or frustrated truths. The story isn’t over until a believable resolution.

Plots has three parts: a theoretical overview and critical readings of King Lear and Crime and Punishment. Belknap acknowledges that so much has been written about plots that any new statement risks being overshadowed. Whole schools of thought (e.g. Russian formalism) and fearsomely famous thinkers (e.g. Aristotle) precede us. But he accepts the challenge, although he neatly sidesteps difficulties by sticking to his own theory, backed by critical readings. You won’t find much here about what made Aristotle better at understanding plots than Roland Barthes; Belknap shows no inclination to disprove others beyond a few cursory remarks.

For Belknap, ‘plots are purposeful arrangements of experience.’ A traditionalist, he sees the author as the central agency behind a literary work of art. Some will see this as unpalatably elitist, as they will the attention shown to the canonical Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. ‘Take it or leave it’ is the prevailing attitude, though the author is an entertaining and thoughtful culture warrior. He contends that literary plots can teach us new ways to look at the world: they engender a sense of expectation (‘what will happen next?’) and result in fulfilment (‘that’s what I wanted to happen’) or frustration (‘that’s not what I thought would happen’).

In his reading of King Lear, Belknap focuses on what he calls the human desire for truth, peace and justice. The play sets questions in the audience’s minds – will Goneril and Regan get their comeuppance? Will Cordelia’s virtue be restored? Will Lear recover his sanity? Lying drives the plot – Shakespeare keeps his characters on stage as long as deception rules. And the audience is compelled to watch because, on the one hand, they’re shocked and attracted by the brazen lies, and because, on the other hand, they desire a virtuous resolution. To Belknap, Shakespeare is at his creative best when he fulfils the audience’s expectations through elaborate, poetically heightened recognition scenes. Lear comes to see his own faults, the true nature of his daughters and the finite nature of his power. And yet, of course, the tragedy lies in how much is lost before this happens.

Crime and Punishment allows Belknap to explore another aspect of lying: the nightmare of a world in which individuals are possessed by ideologies they believe to be just, but which are in fact nihilistic. Shakespeare shows us the triumph of the lie, subverting the established order, before a healthy state is restored through recognition scenes and, not infrequently, violent death purging the body politic. Many of Dostoevsky’s heroes, on the other hand, have an immense capacity for both good and evil. They’re plagued by dreams, Christian imperatives and an innate sense of Beauty and Truth, and yet they’re often self-justifying criminals.

In Crime and Punishment we follow Raskolnikov as he sets out to kill an elderly pawnbroker, because he thinks he’s a superman, a modern Napoleon, who doesn’t need to heed the morality of ‘the herd’. His victim is a louse, feeding off the insulted and injured. The plot brings us frighteningly close to Raskolnikov: ‘the grinding paradox of [the novel is] that we care about the wellbeing of a calculating, self-absorbed hatchet murderer.’ I still don’t think it’s said often enough: Dostoevsky has designs on us, he questions our morality, presenting us with half-crazed criminals we cannot simply ignore. Raskolnikov feels his lies and doubts so sincerely and profoundly that to read his story is to live through his torment. The novel’s epilogue points tantalisingly to the possibly of redemption, when Raskolnikov glimpses the Christian ideal – but Dostoevsky signs off in elliptical fashion: 'That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.'

Plots is insightful if eccentric: Belknap seems to take pleasure in being as brief as possible. Though this can be fun, it can also frustrate; there could have been more literary analyses to enrich the work. Still, we get a new perspective on literary plotting, grounded in a philosophy of the lie. Lying is beautiful because it invents and because it implicitly calls forth a better world. It is only after the lie that truth becomes valuable – before then, it’s but a paltry thing, hardly worth the telling.

Andre van Loon is a freelance literary critic, specialising in new British and American novels and studies of Russian 19th- century literature.