p.3 Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories
that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell... We live immersed in narrative... anticipating
the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.
p.10 It is the ordering of the inexplicable and impossible situation as
narrative that somehow mediates and forcefully connects its discrete elements... there is a dynamic logic at work
in the transformations wrought between the start and finish... a logic which makes sense of succession and time, and which
insists that mediation of the problem posed at the outset takes time: that the meaning dealt with by narrative, and
thus perhaps narrative's raison d'etre, is of and in time.
p.10 Plot, let us say in preliminary definition, is the logic and dynamic
of narrative, and narrative itself a form of understanding and explanation.
p.29 To quote [Sherlock] Holmes at the end of another of his cases, that of "The Naval Treaty": "The
principal difficulty in your case... lay in the fact of there being too much evidence. What was vital was overlaid and hidden
by what was irrelevant. Of all the facts which were presented to us we had to pick just those which we deemed to
be essential, and then piece them together in their order so as to reconstruct this very remarkable chain of events."
p.38 Desire is always there at the start of a narrative... often having reached a state of intensity such
that movement must be created, action undertaken, change begun.
p.55 "Desire is born from the gap [l'ecart] between need and demand..."
In this gap, desire comes into being as a perpetual want for (of) a satisfaction that cannot be offered in
reality. Desire is inherently unsatisfied and unsatisfiable... Such unconscious desire becomes, in the later
life of the subject, a motor of actions whose significance is blocked from consciousness, since interpretation
of its scenarios of fulfillment is not directly accessible to consciousness.
p.61 Narratives portray the motors of desire that drive and consume their plots
p.90 Our exploration so far of how plots may work and what may motivate
them suggests, if not the need, at least the intellectual desirability of finding a model - a model that would provide
a synthetic and comprehensive grasp of the workings of plot, in the most general sense, and of the uses for the plot.
To meet these requirements, such a model will have to be more dynamic than those most often
proposed by the structuralists; it will have to provide ways to think about the movement of plot and its motor force
in human desire, its peculiar relation to beginnings and ends, its apparent claim to rescue meaning from temporal flux.
p.92 narrative meanings are developed in time
p.96 If in the beginning stands desire, and this shows itself ultimately to be desire for the end, between
beginning and end stands a middle that we feel to be necessary... but whose processes, of transformation and working-through,
remain obscure.
p.105 Lacan's theory of desire, born of the gap or split between need and demand. Lacan helps us to understand
how the aims and imaginings of desire - its enactments in response to imaginary scenarios of fulfillment
- move us from the realm of basic drives to highly elaborated fictions.
p.108 As a dynamic-energetic model of narrative plot, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle gives an image of how the nonnarratable existence is stimulated into the condition of narratability, to enter
a state of deviance and detour (ambition, quest, the pose of a mask) in which it is maintained for a certain time, through
an at least minimally complex extravagance, before returning to the quiescence of the nonnarratable.
p.109 Analysis, Freud would eventually discover, is inherently interminable, since
the dynamics of resistance and the transference can always generate new beginnings in relation to any possible end.
p.113 We have defined plot, for our purposes, as a structuring operation deployed by narratives, or associated
in the reading of narratives: as the logic and syntax of those meanings that develop only through sequence and succession.
p.143 My understanding of plot as intention and dynamic in narrative... has led me to talk of desire
as a thematic instrumentality of plot and as a basic motivation of its telling... If plots seem frequently
to be about investments of desire and the effort to bind and master intensive levels of energy, this corresponds... to narratives
thematically oriented toward ambition, possession, mastery... of the world
p.174 This is the essential point: the failed coherence of the Balzacian "system" of will, desire, and ambition
produces a failure of coherence in the novelistic plot itself, a refusal of the narrative to achieve the kinds of significance
that we expect from narrative arrangements of experience - or simply from narrative arrangements of discourse.
p.192 Desire and its objects are ever in a relation of chiasmus: you are never
there where desire is to be realized; and when desire is realized, it is never in the right place or with the right
person.
p.285 It is of overwhelming importance to us that life still be narratable, which may mean finding those
provisional, tenuous plots that appear to capture the force of desire that cannot speak its name but compels us in a movement
- recursive, complex, unclosed - toward meaning.
p.312 "All desire aims at the future, and this especially, because it is a desire for a
revelatory knowledge to come..."
p.320 the energetic-dynamic model, which speaks to the question of the human
life-span, its movement and arrest, and hence to the organization of biography and the energetics of the life story
