English M A syllabus an essay by R S Crane....(criticism)

2. THE CONCEPT OF PLOT AND PLOT OF ‘TOMJONES’’
-R.S CRANE
R.S CRANE
A leader of Chicago School of Criticism
 Revised and developed the concept of
‘form’ in Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ and made a
distinction between form and structure.
 ‘The Languages of Criticism and the
Structure of Poetry and Critical and
Historical Principles of Literary History’
formed the foundation for Chicago
movement.

3.  R.S Crane and the Chicago critics are often
referred to as “Neo-Aristotelians", tried to
liberate New Criticism from a mechanical
Formalism.
 Chicago School emerged as a reaction against
New Criticism but had to subsume it under New
Criticism itself.
 “The Concept of Plot and Plot of ‘Tom Jones’”
appeared in “Critics and Criticism:
Ancient and Modern”(1952).
 The plot of Tom Jones has elicited the
most unqualified praise.

4.  “‘Oedipus Tyrannus’, ‘The Alchemist’ ,and ‘Tom
Jones’ are the three most perfect plots ever
planned” –Coleridge
PART-I
 Crane concerns about the nature and critical
adequacy of the conception of plot in general
and the plot of ‘Tom Jones’.
 The strictly limited definition of plot is as
something that can be abstracted from the
moral qualities of the characters and the
operations of their thought.
 Plot is equated with the material continuity of
the story and the fictional maintenance of

5.  Plots are considered good in terms of the
variety of incidents it contains ,the amount of
suspense it evokes and the ingenuity with
which all the happenings in the beginning and
middle are made to contribute to the resolution
at the end.
 Critics says ‘Tom Jones’s plot as perfect
because of its “felicitous contrivance and happy
extrication of the story”.
 Plot in the earlier discussions is simply one of
several sources of interest and pleasure
afforded by a novel.
 The plot is viewed not as an end but a means.

6.  Plot is described through metaphors like “frame
work” for characters ,or mechanism.
 According to Crane it is a very limited and
abstract definition of plot which leads to
fragmented criticism of works like ‘Tom Jones’.
 Any novel is a composite of 3 elements
 The things that are imitated in it.
 The linguistic medium in which they are
imitated.
 Manner of technique of imitation.
 Thus the plot is the particular temporal
synthesis of the elements of action, character

7.  According to the three elements , plot will differ
in structure.
 Plots of Action-change is in the character’s
situation.
 Plots of Character-change in the moral
character of the protagonist
 Plots of thought-change is in the thought and
feelings of character.
 Thus plot is as such synthesis endowed
necessarily because it imitates in words a
sequence of human activities, with a power to
affect our emotions and opinions in a general
way.

8.  The pleasure in the gradual unfolding of events
and the resultant curiosity and learning are
fundamental to the greatness of any plot.
 The form of the plot is that which makes its
matter into a definite artistic thing.
 The form of the plot is, Crane argues, its
distinctive working or power.
PART-II
 After establishing plot as a total organic form,
Crane proceeds to an analysis of the plot of
‘Tom Jones’.

9.  Sustained concealment and final disclosure of
Tom’s parentage is the unifying idea by which
the plot is held together in ‘Tom Jones’.
 Other unifying factors are the love affair of Tom
and Sophia, the conflict between Tom and Blifil
and the quasi picaresque of Tom’s adventures
with women and on the road.
 But plot of Tom Jones has a distinctive and
dynamic unity that is beyond the combination of
such parts.
 Crane makes a detailed textual analysis of the
plot of Tom Jones to substantiate his notion of
organic emotive unity.

10.  His survey starts from Bridget’s scheme to provide
security for both herself and her illegitimate son by
palming off Tom on Allworthy as a foundling.
 Tom acquires an antagonist in the younger Blifil.
Tom’s budding love for Sophia is built on the
likeness of nature. Tom’s mistaken confession that
he is the father of Molly’s child and a series of
machinations by other characters blacken the
character of Tom. But Fielding manages to
maintain a positive impression throughout in the
mind of the reader regarding the innate goodness
of Tom. Even his affair with Lady Bellaston is
handled carefully so that Tom does not regarded
into a totally base character. Ultimately fortune
begins to turn in favour of Tom to bring about the
final resolution of the plot.

11.  Crane argues that the unity of the plot of Tom Jones is to
be found in this total system of actions, moving by
probable or necessary connections from beginning
through middle to end.
 The artistic quality of the work emanates from this unity
of action coupled with the evolution of the character of
Tom and the resultant world view concerning virtue and
vice.
 Crane goes forward into an analysis of the different
variables contributing to the strength of the plot of Tom
Jones.
 One of these is the character traits of the hero, which
prompt us to like or dislike him , and wish good or bad
fortune for him. Then there is the judgement we make
about the pleasurable or painful effects of the events
that happen in the life of the hero.
 The form of a given plot is a function of the particular
correlation among these three variables.
 Based on this we may assume that the plot of Tom

12.  The hero is intrinsically virtuous. A series of
painful incidents occur to him. We follow him
through his troubles and distresses with a
desire that he will eventually be delivered from
them.
 This notion corresponds to the “Comic Vision”
propounded by Northrop Frye. To maintain this
comic effect, Fielding take’s recourse to various
techniques of characterization.
 The reader gets a perception, which in ease
case grows stronger as the novel proceeds,
that the persons whose actions for whom,
though in varying degrees, we are bound to feel

13.  The reader is given a feeling of security that nothing
irreparable, can befall the hero.
 Hence the action of the antagonists constantly evoke not
an intense concern for the hero but a kind of a amused
laughter.
 Our fear for the hero increasingly declines as the plot
progresses. This attenuation of fear, pity and indignation
is a necessary condition of the peculiar comic pleasure
which is the form of the plot in ‘Tom Jones’.
 Crane presents a contrast between the comic plot of
Tom Jones and the comic plots of some other classics,
for instance ‘The Silent Woman’ or ‘Volpone’ by Ben
Jonson.
 In such classics, a morally despicable person is made,
by reason of his own folly or lapse from cleverness, to
suffer a humiliating end, to him, though not to others,
painful reversal of fortune.

14. • The comedy of Blifil is indeed of this simple harsh
kind.
 But the comedy of Tom and hence of the plot as a
whole is of a different sort. It is not simple comedy but
mixed. We always maintain a favourable attitude
towards the protagonist irrespective of what the
blunders arise from no permanent weakness of
character but are merely the natural errors of
judgement, easily corrigible in the future, of an
inexperienced and too impulsively generous and
gallant young man.
 We experienced a kind of faint alarm which is the
comic analogue of fear.
 Because of our confidence that no permanent harm
can happen to him, we do not pity him in his moments
of misfortune but rather laugh at him as a man who
has behaved ridiculously or beneath himself and is

15.  Tom is a good man, and we expect him to go
better, and so our amused reaction to his
sufferings lack entirely the punitive quality that
characterizers comedy of the Jonsonian type.
 If the anticipatory emotion is a mild shudder of
apprehension, the climatic emotion – the comic
analogue of pity – is a kind of friendly mirth at his
expense.
 Thus the Aristotelian tragic emotions of fear and
pity get transmuted to apprehension and pleasure
in the comic mode.
 This “working or power of Tom Jones”, the manner
in which Fielding handles the constituent parts of
the novel, sustains and maximizes the special
pleasure of Tom Jones, which is its form.

16.  After having established the plot of Tom Jones as a
product of powerful and dynamic form, Crane
makes an analysis of some of its shortcomings.
 No plot can be ideal or perfect.
 Even in Tom Jones there are frequent longueurs
(long and tedious sections) like the Man of the Hill
Story.
 There are other general faults, too. The
introductory essays, while we should not like to
lose them from the cannon of Fielding’s writings
serve only occasionally the functions of chorus.
 But Crane says that despite such minor blemishes,
there are not many novels of comparable length in
which the various parts are conceived and
developed with a shrewder eye to what is required
for a maximum realization of the form.

17.  After summarizing the major factors that contribute
to the organic unity of plot of ‘Tom Jones’.
 Crane states that his attempt is not so much to
attempt a revaluation of the novel as to make clear
the assumptions and to illustrate some of the
possibilities for practical criticism of a kind of whole
–part analysis of narrative, that is, one which view
plot as a “first principle of artistic construction”, not
withstanding its limitations.
 The distinctive character of this approach derives
from the fact that it views a work of art as a
dynamic whole which affects our emotions in a
certain way through the functioning together of its
elements in subordination to a determinate poetic
form.

18.  This method which Crane terms “a poetics of
form”, depends on the analytical isolation of
works of art, as finished products, from the
circumstances and processes of their origin.
 Demonstrating his “pluralist” view of criticism,
Crane contends that the criticism of forms must
be supplemented by the criticism of qualities
and by historical enquiries of various sorts.
 The criticism of qualities and the investigation of
historical origins and significances may be done
independently, but will attain better results when
solidly founded on formal principles.

19.  This would lead to less criticism of the dogmatic
sort that censures writers for not exhibiting
virtues of language or thought incompatible with
the specific tasks these writers chose to
undertake as well as fewer literary histories
written without reference to the formal ends
which helped to determine the use made by
particular writers of materials and technology.

21. Submitted By
Temina Cyriac
1 MA English Literature
Alphonsa College, Palai