Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel

Pardis Dabashi's Losing the Plot revises the way modernist plot can be conceived in conversation with narrative film, though the two are rarely linked. At first, the book's aim is to show the breakdown of plot in nineteenth-century “realism.” After locating itself through various theoretical underpinnings, the book reaches toward “Hollywood mainstream cinema” as necessarily “palliative” for the three writers discussed: Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner, finding more livability in silver-screen “plots.” If in their own work, they “lose the plot,” they are nevertheless drawn to narratives remarkably similar to those by Dickens, cited by Sergei Eisenstein as precursor to film through elaborate plot, textured montages, multiple voices. Dabashi ultimately calls for an “affective dimension,” the “feeling” element in her title, her authors, characters, and stars experiencing longing and loss.Seemingly uninterested in definitive modernist boundaries, Dabashi corrals three specific writers between 1920 and 1940 who simultaneously resisted the hegemony associated with narrative teleology and who relied on the three-dimensional experience of watching films that soothe the writers who differently mourn a wholeness that does not share the “failure” implicit in their own illegible, incomplete, painful plots. This clash is compelling, though we may wonder at the modern writer's devaluing their less salvific narratives that inventively expose the gripping arenas of inequality, racism, and heteronormativity. This differentiation becomes less stark, more revelatory in Dabashi's perspective. These modernists are effectively at odds with Hollywood film—yet they veer toward narrative fantasy, in fact enjoying the retreat offered “in the privacy of their own minds, in their letters, in their red velvet seats” (30) to observe ontological successes denied them by their own complex fragmented writing, truer to a modern experience of nonbelonging—even for the Southern-born Faulkner who enjoys white masculinity and privilege.Pairing Larsen's Helga in Quicksand (1928) as well as Passing (1929) with Garbo is and is not a brilliant move. George Cukor's Camille (1936) comforts Larsen, finding solace in a silver-screen star who managed to rise from the dregs into celebrity, and in Camille, assured of another's love: both Garbo and her character are extraordinary foils for Larsen. Aware of the risk of her “speculative critical practice,” and that “of being wrong and in the process of being wrong open up new lines of inquiry,” (39) Dabashi admittedly foregrounds the experimental quality in her method. She claims, for instance, that Larsen “watched Garbo's Camille multiple times” (38), based on Thadious Davis's landmark biography she cites. However, Davis writes that Larsen only viewed the film twice when it came out in 1936. Dabashi admits that watching Garbo places “this later moment of her life in stereoscopic relation to a previous one” (i.e., the writing of her novels?). By a kind of sleight of hand, Dubashi does not face head-on the temporal incompatibility for her comparison between not only Quicksand and Camille, but also Passing (1929) and Garbo in Mata Hari (1931). Nevertheless, Dubashi shows with verve Garbo's “problematic twoness” as well as “the constructedness of white racial identity” through “techniques of costume desiring, lighting, and cinematography, making whiteness appear coextensive with the fantasy of narrative unity.”Losing the Plot foregrounds the “longing” likely present for Larsen when she viewed mainstream film, which largely works to obfuscate lived precarity. Still Dabashi argues for “the novel's relationality to other forms, its awareness of and responsiveness to other technologies of representation” (9).This is an exciting argument, yet Larsen's work only has post-relationality to Garbo's films. Larsen's Quicksand “expresses unwillingness to deliver on the bildungsroman generic promise to yield a coherent, ‘deep’ subject’ ” (57), yet Dabashi evades the possibility that she might have enjoyed being unsettled by the gap between her own precarious nonbelonging and the Hollywood fantasy-machine that “palliates.”Dabashi too readily dismisses iconic modernists (perhaps because they are culturally associated with experimental writing) who enjoyed film, such as Gertrude Stein (mentioned several times). Larsen, as does Stein, sees the holes in inherited narratives of longing and foreclosure of longing. Given Stein's Jewishness, obesity, and lesbianism—all marks of precarity, she turns to popular detective fiction as well as to Charlie Chaplin, falling apart to fall together again. A reflex allergy to the avant-garde as such, Dabashi also ignores (not even granting a footnote) both the modernist journal Close Up (1927 – 33) as well as the Pool Group's (with H. D., Bryher, and Kenneth Macpherson) experimental Borderline in 1930, a film specifically centered on miscegenation and racism, rendering vulnerable precarity in the lived white and Black characters, namely the star Paul Robeson, with his wife Eslanda as biracial prompt for melodramatic plot.The chapter on Barnes's 1936 Nightwood is set in dialogue with Marlene Dietrich's roles in Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932), two films Barnes viewed while “nursing a broken heart” after losing Thelma Wood (Robin Vote in the novel), this loss prompting Nightwood's meandering plot. Robin as character derives from “Dietrich's silences” as well as “the queer icon's emotional minimalism” (40). Further, Dabashi's argument that early film from 1895 to 1913 is “integral to understanding of how the formal experiments of The Sound and the Fury” (41) is convincing. Choosing not to focus on Faulkner's own scripts for Hollywood cinema, Dabashi attends to Faulkner growing up with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, offering “palliative promises of narrative unity.” (22) In effect, The Sound and the Fury reveals plot as “a form of paranoid sensemaking, born out of desire for narrative coherence” (134). Faulkner, unwittingly or not, exposes “the amenability of plot and plotting to an ideology of heteronormative white supremacy” (135).Dabashi refreshingly suggests that while “certainty” belongs to our “argumentative conventions,” surety is less operative when we talk “over coffee, over dinner, at the movies, on the couch watching Netflix” (42). Indeed, Losing the Plot insists that modernist plot (in writing and film) is “an object of ambivalence” (42), the book subtly itself ambivalent about theory versus embodied experience. This much is certain—Dabashi asks us to confront that what soothes us in film may not be in reality so soothing.