The Natural Laws of Plot

Why do we distinguish between plot and setting? This book argues that we should not: a novel's plot relies minutely on the characteristics that are attributed to an outstretched physical world. Bodies behave according to laws that are built into worlds by plot. But such laws do not originate solely in an author's invention. Connecting the history of the novel to the history of science, this book argues that, in the novel from Defoe to Austen and Scott, plot explored alongside natural philosophy the ideaof a unified and regular physical world. How do bodies move, stop, or combine? How do things exert force or resist it, decay or combine with each other? How are natural kinds organized? How can experiences reveal something about the order of the world? Where do human wishing and action belong in it? In these novels, plot does not occur exclusively at the scale of human aims or choices. Indeed, plot comes to be suspicious of subjectivity. It is often more interested in events and non-human forces that operate at various scales. It takes up causes and consequences that occur independently of anyone's desire. Unlike many studies of plot, then, this book does not consider plot as a shape, line, or arc. In a novel, plot cannot be disentangled from the concrete steps through which an action unfolds and the underlying structures that allow or do not allow it to succeed. Plot is immersive and powerful because it satisfies our wish to know how things happen in a coherent, objective and possibly real world--