The domain model asks one question of a secondary chain: what does this thread supply that the main plot, by its nature, cannot? It is the attention tax in working form, and its use is that it turns this subplot feels like filler into separate complaints with separate remedies. It carries two dangers. Any thread can be described afterwards as serving some domain, so a claim of counterpoint must say what the relation asserts and what would be lost without it. And a writer who learns six domains will try to serve six, which loads a thread until it has no shape of its own. Five domains follow, then a proposed sixth.
Thematic counterpoint
Thematic counterpoint supplies a second treatment of the book’s governing question, conducted by other people under other conditions, so that the main plot’s answer reads as one answer rather than the only one. Its carriers are the parallel dilemma, the road not taken, the inverted outcome, the success that costs more or less than expected, the shared object or institution, and the rhyming gesture. What separates delivery from claim is the difference between analogy and duplication. An analogy restates the question in other terms, and the difference in terms informs; a duplication restates it in the same terms, and the reader learns only that the book believes what it has already said. The working test is to ask what the book asserts with this thread that it could not assert without it: an answer naming a qualification, a cost, an alternative or a limit is counterpoint, and “the same thing, again, about someone else” is not. Under-delivery is the decorative rhyme, a parallel the writer can point to but not interpret, or the unmarked analogy, whose two halves lie eighty pages apart. Over-delivery is the thesis thread, peopled by positions, or the rhyme underlined by a narrator who does not trust the structure. In Middlemarch four threads treat vocation and its compromise, and each character finds a different relation between what they wanted and what a provincial town will pay for.
Character testing ground
The character testing ground applies a pressure the main plot has no occasion to apply: money where the main plot has love, a sibling where it has a lover, a situation with no audience. Its value is information the main plot cannot fake. In the main plot behaviour is partly excused by the stakes; under a subplot’s smaller stakes it is unexcused. A man who is brave under fire has told the reader about the fire, and a man who cannot tell his sisters he has sold a shop has told the reader about himself. The requirement is that the trait revealed carries weight later, ideally the trait on which a main-plot decision turns; otherwise the thread is an anecdote at subplot prices. Over-delivery is the showcase, in which a character is tested and simply passes. Nikolai Rostov’s card game with Dolokhov in War and Peace is the model: the war has proved his courage, and the card table finds his shame about money and his inability to refuse a man he admires, which no battle chapter could reach.
Pacing relief
Pacing relief changes register, rhythm or stakes so that the main plot’s tension can be sustained without stalling. Tension is relational: two hundred pages at full pressure read as monotony, because the reader loses the contrast against which pressure is felt. Relief is not a pause, since a subplot lowers the pressure while a story continues to run; and a cut away from the main plot at its moment of greatest pressure turns relief into suspense, provided the interruption is short. This is the domain that most often appears alone, and a thread that can claim only relief has the shape readers call filler. Under-delivery is the holiday, a thread the reader can skip without losing anything she could name; over-delivery is the tonal breach, or relief the reader comes to prefer. The Bagnet household in Bleak House shows the domain at full value: a warm domestic runner that turns into plot when the Bagnets stand surety for George, so that debt reaches the one household that seemed safe from it.
Structural convergence
Structural convergence is an eventual intersection in which the subplot’s chain complicates, obstructs, accelerates or resolves the main plot’s. A book with a main plot cannot do without it, with two loosenings. Convergence may be thematic, Levin’s integration by analogy. And it is a gradient rather than a moment, built from a shared minor character, then a shared place, then a shared consequence, so that a thread which has never touched the main plot and then touches it decisively reads as contrivance however well it was prepared. Its carriers are the supplied object (a document, a key, a witness), the supplied constraint (a deadline or a prohibition), the supplied person, the shared secret, the collision of incompatible goals, and the revealed identity, which is the carrier most open to abuse because an identity can join anything to anything. Under-delivery is the parallel line, or convergence by proximity, in which characters merely meet. Over-delivery is the mechanism thread, which exists only to hand over an object, or total convergence, in which every thread resolves at once in one room.
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) ends in total convergence. The Joneses, the Iqbals and the Chalfens are gathered at the unveiling of the FutureMouse on New Year’s Eve 1992, where Archie Jones takes in the thigh the bullet Millat fires at the scientist Archie was ordered to kill in 1945 and spared, and the mouse escapes. James Wood coined the phrase hysterical realism in a hostile review of the novel, and the ending is where the charge is easiest to see; readers who defend it argue that the convergence is the book’s comedy of connection, in which the past cannot be kept out of the room. The disagreement is a fair test of whether total convergence can be a style rather than a fault.
World expansion
World expansion gives access to territory the protagonist’s goal never visits: another class, institution, place, faction or body of knowledge. The nineteenth-century social novel used it for serious purposes, since a novel arguing that a society is one connected system must show more of the system than one life touches. Its difficulty is that it is the only domain that can be served without a chain, simply by describing the territory, and the description is then a digression. The discrimination is whether the territory is entered by someone who wants something there. Jo the crossing-sweeper in Bleak House has a chain, wanting to be let alone and to move on, being prevented, and dying of it, and through him the novel’s argument that Chancery and the slum are one system is made as narrative. Under-delivery is the tour, a setting without a reversal; over-delivery is research on parade, or a world more interesting than the book.
A proposed sixth: temporal counterpoint
The five domains are defined by content. A sixth relation between chains is one of rate. Temporal counterpoint is a subplot running on a different clock from the main plot’s, slower, faster or set in another period, whose function is to make the main plot’s pace visible by contrast and to let the book hold a duration it could not otherwise contain. A chain has one rate, and a novel about three days cannot also render three generations unless a second thread does it. Bleak House sets Esther’s months against the generations of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and Wuthering Heights sets two generations against each other. The domain also names a failure the others cannot: a competently built, converged thread that still reads as inert because both threads move at one rate and the crossings produce no variation.
The objections are serious. Temporal counterpoint may be a property of the telling rather than something a thread supplies; it rarely appears without thematic counterpoint; and it hands every slow, inert thread a defence, an objection this chapter cannot answer. The chapter adopts the domain for diagnosis on condition that a thread claiming it also shows a chain. The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4) proposes a temporal domain for the single detail, and Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture (Chapter 8), which treats the arrangement of times across a whole book, adopts both at that scale, this one as a property of the arrangement, claimed only where a crossing shows the difference of rate, which answers the objection this chapter could not; for threads in one time, the condition above stands.
How many domains?
The domains are a budget, not a checklist, and three rules of thumb follow. One domain alone is rarely enough, and the first move for a thread that can claim only one is to find the second job it could do in the pages it already occupies. Two domains are the working minimum, and thematic counterpoint with structural convergence is the most durable pair, because the thread then means something and does something. More than three declared domains usually indicate a co-plot, a thread with the weight of a second main plot, and the right question is then whether it should be the main plot. Against all three stands a qualification: a thread serving one domain superbly beats one serving four adequately. The Ilyusha thread in The Brothers Karamazov would score poorly for world expansion and pacing, and it closes the novel.
See also: the Reference domains, with a table of carriers for each domain and the case against temporal counterpoint at full strength.