Death as a Plot Problem

Abstract

In the essay “Death as a Problem of Plot” (1993), Yuri Lotman addresses the theme of death as a semiotic problem, and this analysis gives rise to new ways of understanding the procedures of the fiction writer, the historian, and the poet. Lotman highlights the paradox between the continuity of the process of multiplication of collective life, on the one hand, and its discontinuity in individual existence. The human desire to attribute meaning and purpose to actions and events led us to divide uninterrupted reality into conventional segments, the only way to make it accessible to understanding. As mythological thought was replaced by historical, the concept of ending began to acquire a preponderant character in the process of artistic reflection. If mythological consciousness produced cyclical plots, historical consciousness was responsible for the introduction of linear plots, in which beginnings and endings gained a prominent role.