Losing the Plot

An examination of the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema reveals a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction. The modernist novel sought to escape what Virginia Woolf called the tyranny of plot. Yet even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of plot-driven Victorian novels, plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulknerwriters known for their affinities and connections to classical HollywoodPardis Dabashi links the moviegoing practices of these writers to the tensions between the formal properties of their novels and the characters in them. Even when they did not feature outright happy endings, classical Hollywood films often provided satisfying formal resolutions and promoted normative social and political values. Watching these films, modernist authors were reminded of what they were leaving behindboth formally and in the name of aesthetic experimentalismby losing the plot.