… the novel of plot persuades us in concrete fashion that human action, human life, is somehow a complete, interlocking whole, a single, formed, meaningful substance. In the long run, of course, the source of this lived unity lies not in metaphysics or religion, but in society itself, which may be judged, at any given moment of its development, from the fact that it does or does not offer raw materials such that Plot can be constructed from them. Thus the appearance of a melodramatic strain in classical plot (particularly toward the middle of the nineteenth century) is a sign that events no longer cohere, that the author has had to appeal to Evil, to villains and conspiracies, to restore some of the unity he felt beyond his power to convey in the events themselves. For it is axiomatic that the existence of a determinate literary form always reflects a certain possibility of experience in the moment of social development in question. Our satisfaction with the completeness of plot is therefore a kind of satisfaction with society as well, which has through the very possibility of such an ordering of events revealed itself to be a coherent totality, and one with which, for the moment, the individual unit, the individual human life itself, is not in contradiction.
Fredric Jameson, “Metacommentary,” in PMLA 86.1 (1971)