OK, well, thank you for admitting the day change, you may already have realised that literature in form is an inadequate title for this ragbag of lectures and classes. Unreliable narration isn't a form, it's a mode. Comparative literature is. Well, I'm spending an hour discussing what comparative literature is next week, but that's not really formal either. But Russian formalism has something to do with form, though it's by no means exclusively concerned with it.
That and check structuralism. You're all very welcome. Very warmly. Welcome to that's in week five in seminar room B, no prior knowledge of any relevant texts is needed, though some of you may well already have read some of the Russian analysts and indeed some Jakobsen and he would count as a check structuralist. And then perhaps the oddity is what micro texts are just very short forms of literature, the haiku, for example, in poetry, but will be most of all looking at very short forms of prose.
The micro story, which is a very short, short story, and then will be going on to look at found pieces of very short prose signs that you see that can be allowed to resonate like mind your head. It was, in fact, mind your head when I saw that on the sign above some steps down to a cellar that really started me thinking about the whole issue of very short forms of prose and how they can function as poetry. So that will be really an exercise in close reading. That's in sixth week.
Yeah, the anomaly is next week. What is comparative literature? What indeed. And I've put scare quotes. They are scare quotes around the comparative because I think that's a strange adjective. And a lot of thought, as you may have found yourselves, already comes from a sense of irritation, a sense of irritation that something doesn't quite make sense.
And as long as I've heard of such subject as a comparative literature, I've thought that it wasn't coherent, that there's something fishy about the way that adjective is operating in relation to literature. So next week, I want to take that apart. That's going to be fairly abstract. So any of you with a philosophical bent of mind may enjoy that. It's not that much to do with knowing different languages. That seems to be contingent.
So it's by no means principally even directed at people who want to work in more than one language, though that will come into it. OK, for this week, multiple plotting. You may well yourselves have realised by now that the vocabulary of plotting in literary theory is vexed. So consider the first point on your hand out. The word plot was first used to refer to the outline of a literary work, which is correspondence to Aristotle's term Musso's in fifteen forty eight in the English language.
Within half a century of that date, it meant by transference, a secret plan or project which had a dastardly end in mind, like blowing up the houses of Parliament. It was in the twentieth century that the term plot, though, became confused, and Forster pronounced confidently that, quote, The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died and then the queen died of. Grief is a plot. The time sequence is is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.
However, a decade earlier in Petrograd, Vladimir Orlovsky had made the distinction to be discussed further and week five between Fibular and Shusett, which is the difference between what happens and how it is told. These terms, McCluskey's terms, fabulous Fugit got translated into English as follows popular What Happens became story and Sujit, how it is told, became a plot. And these two senses of story and plot eventually trumped Faustus.
So if you want to use these that binary distinction in Faustus sense, I would specify that that's what you're doing. But I think that these translations of these Russian formalised terms have been unfortunate, they're slightly misaligned to the common usage in English of both of those words. If you ask someone to tell you the plot of Twelfth Night, they're not likely to give you a scene by scene summary, which would be plot in the structuralists sense.
They're likely instead to tell you a rough outline of the developing relationships of the noble characters Orsino, Olivia and Violence DeSario. Then what happens with the lower life prose speaking characters? Toby, first day and so on. And then they'd interpolate backwards to Sebastian's actions on the island, saying something like and by the way, Viola, what she doesn't know is that her brother has survived and has ended up on the same island and then they would describe the denouement.
The word story, on the other hand, is often used to refer to a whole object rather than an abstract deduced from it. One does not sit a child down and read the main plot, but there it is. We get used to using these terms in the new review, in the new reverse sense of their colloquial meanings when speaking narrative logically. And then the story gets even more confused of the plot with the front French structuralists.
The French translator translate Fabiola by either Histoire or Kunt and Superjet by either Racey or discolour. Some structuralists like Colores prefer to use the term story and discourse to story and plot. But then that adds yet another burden to the already overburdened word discourse. If anything comprehensible has emerged from all of this, then it then it promptly gets thrown by the term multiple plotting.
When we talk about Middlemarch, say, being multi plotted, are we not in fact saying that it has multiple stories, for example, the stories of Dorothea of Liftgate and of Mary Garthe rather than their plots as narrated in the novel? So in the term multiple totted, we have to accept that plot means story. But if we accept that Dorothea and litigate and Marie have their own plots in Middlemarch, then another problem arises.
Could it not be objected that Kassabian, Rosewoman, Vincey, Fred, Vincey, also have their own plots, as in fact do Selya, Fairbrother, Brooke Gladstone, Mr Bulstrode, Mrs Bulstrode Raffles and the Middlemarch Gosset Mrs Called Wallaga does not. In fact, every character who appears in a novel, perhaps more than once you might like to say, have their own plot. And therefore there are always as many plots in novels as there are characters.
I say that they have to appear more than once because if they don't, they don't have that extension in time, which is necessary for a plot to exist. I don't think you need to think about that question for long to realise that there is a critical benefit to making a distinction between works with one obvious centre and works with multiple centres, for example, between Adam Bede and Middlemarch or between Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights or between Oliver Twist and Bleak House.
So what we are doing in making this distinction is, in fact, discerning the number of dominant plots in a novel. So this is now my own definition. Point to what I mean by dominant plots is the number of narratives which follow the lives of one character or a closely interconnected group of characters which have roughly equal significance to each other, but are not dominated by any other of significantly greater importance in that novel.
And by importance in that novel, I don't just mean textual space. There are several other criteria which, according to whatever your critical biases and predilections are, may be felt to determine importance. For example, how far one story helps to interpret another. To what extent it is dominated by Jacobsson, the check structuralist by his poetic function.
How hetero glossy it is to use Bastion's term, to what extent it affects a shift in the reader's horizon of expectations to use reader response vocabulary.
How many of ECES interpretative gaffes it allows to the reader, how much didactic import it carries, how accurately it represents the world through perhaps its balanced tensions or its topicality, or whether it is atypical or whether it involves an important human problem or a painful, urgent or admirable emotion, or whether that story belongs to a sympathetic character.
All of these factors and many other like them can help to determine what we consider the most important plots in a work of fiction. I said that dominant plots are roughly equal importance. You don't have to consider Dorothea's and Litigates plots in Middlemarch as of exactly equal importance to recognise that they both overwhelm the importance of the plots of Mr. Brooke or Mrs Cadwallader, and also to see that there were no other plots which are more important than theirs.
The same is true of plots and subplots in drama. By the way, when we come to thinking about middle multiple lotting, there's not much theory on this subject around. You really need to go to dramatic criticism because it's in drama that this is the issue of plotting has being best thought through. So King Lear is double plotted in having a plot, which is Lears and a subplot which is Gloucester's. But you certainly wouldn't describe the play's single Plotted.
It's not by coincidence that all the examples of novels I've taken so far are from the 19th century, if you run your mind across the 18th century novels, you know, it may strike you that a lot of them are not only named for one character, but have only one central character whose story is told Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Moll, Flanders, Clarissa, Pamela, Shamila, Tristram Shandy. In the 19th century, the novel expanded in terms of numbers, readers, sales and prestige, if not length.
And we see that novels also increase in the number and complexity of their plots. Look at point three on your handouts and try to find a single centre to Wuthering Heights. Sense and Sensibility, surely. Vanity Fair. Nicholas Nickleby. A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Felix Hult, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, all of these have more than one dominant plot. Many were written between the eighteen forties and the eighteen seventies.
And I would suggest that it is that period in which multiple plotting was at its height. Serial publication and a realist wish to reproduce. The multiplicity of life itself are just two of the factors which in this period favoured the multiplication of plots. And in a different way, the wish I wish to reproduce the multiplicity of life itself also animated the modernists think of Ulysses. Mrs. Dalloway. The waves, the rainbow.
All of which have multiple centres, you'll notice that only a few of these novels, the ones I've printed in bold point to multiplicity in their titles, Sense and Sensibility, A Tale of Two Cities Point Counterpoint. Some have geographical names which can set out the space within which multiple actions occur, Vanity Fair or Middlemarch, but some, like so many 18th century novels, give only a single character's name in a way which belies the importance of the other stories it contains.
Daniel Deronda, as has been often pointed out, is misnamed in the sense that well over half of this novel is about Gwendolyn Harless, who has a quite distinct plot of her own. Wuthering Heights is as much about Rush cross-grained. And in this case, in these cases, it's always worth asking, is the named character or place that which the novel is asking its readers to favour often, but not always.
That's the case. Once you find several plots in a work, the question immediately poses itself, what does the work as a whole mean? Do the plots in their interrelations amount to anything greater than the sum of the parts? This is a question which we are relatively used to thinking about in relation to early modern drama. What is the relationship of the plot to the subplot of King Lear is a standard and expected exam question.
We are not similarly used to thinking about the relationship of the Septimus Smith plot to the Mrs. Dalloway plot, in part because, as I say, within studies of the novel, it's an undeveloped area of theory. Henry James and I can't count the number of times which I've already quoted. This is famous quotation from James already in lectures of this year, once famously asked of the newcomers Lihua Mustaf and War and Peace.
What do such large loose body monsters with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary artistically mean? The question in relation to multiple shotted novels to revise his question is what do such many headed monsters actually mean? Do their heads point to each other and have a coherent conversation which may be overheard and summarised? Or do they point away from each other and refuse to to converse? Or perhaps they do speak to each other, but in different languages.
And if they speak, what do they speak about? Before I start to try and answer those questions, I want to introduce a further distinction that between the two headed work, the Zaphod Beeble Brocks of the novel world and the work with more than two heads, the hydra of the novel world, to this end, my vocabulary is going to have to go through a further mutation. The prefix multi will now be used to refer to more than two.
So I'm going to be distinguishing double plotted novels from multi plotted novels considered point five. One of the features of double plots is that they can often be clearly distinguished as such, it is clear that Sense and Sensibility and Daniel Deronda and Ulisses have two main protagonists, but it is not so clear how many dominant stories there are in Middlemarch. I've suggested three so far, but some critics consider that there are four or more.
An early critic of war and peace compared that novel to an Indian Idol, three heads or four faces and six arms. So he wasn't sure how to count war and peace. And in fact, there is no critical agreement on that question either. Apparently, paradoxically, multiplicity can make it easier to understand the relations of plots to each other. What we have in Middlemarch is the world of an English Midlands town in the early eighteen thirties.
All of the different plots are connected by this town and can be related to it. And conversely, these plots between them create this world. No character is wholly divorced from any other, either in terms of their causal impact on each other's lives, however mediated or in terms of interprete ability, they exist in the same world of fiction as well as the same fictional world war.
And peace is a more complicated case because it does have two kinds of action as named in the title, and it covers everywhere from Prussian battlegrounds to Siberian drawing rooms to prisons to the St. Petersburg court. But the novel is rightly called an epic, since it concerns the fate of a country. And Russia is the mediating concept of the whole novel.
In both of these novels, Middlemarch and War and Peace, the multiplicity of stories between them guarantee a single world of time, space and discourse, just as in realist painting where the implied perspectives are infinite. So in this kind of realist novel, the implication of the multiple stories is that there could be, and in fact is an infinity of stories existing in that world. They just haven't all been narrated or not, or with the same level of detail.
This set up also allows many different kinds of investigation to take place. A single situation may be studied in several different characters. So, for example, the situation of a man in a morally conflicted situation is explored in Litigate and Bulstrode and Fairbrother. The situation of a young wife frustrated by her husband is explored in Dorothea and very differently.
Rosamond. The implication of these comparisons may be the great range of human character and experience or those comparisons and may actually generate the reverse conclusion. The things that litigate and Bulstrode have in common, despite their great differences, may be thought to point to the limited range of human nature and the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. The case of a novel which is clearly double plotted is rather different look at Figure six and think of the stars.
If you see three stars, you are likely to see a triangular constellation, five stars might be Cassiopeia, a million stars, the Milky Way, War and Peace. But given two stars as shown in Figure seven, you could be forgiven for seeing them as two separate stars rather than a constellation. Perhaps because they are all they make up between them is a one dimensional object, a line, whereas once you have three points, you have two dimensions and therefore a shape.
Henry James, again, point eight, had a mortal horror of two stories, two pictures in one, the reason for this was the clearest my subject was immediately under that disadvantage, so cheated of its indispensable centre as to become of no more use for expressing a main intention than a wheel without a hub is of use for moving a cart. Dryden Point nine had a politicised distrust of such parity when two actions are equally laboured and driven on by the writer.
Then there is no longer one play. But to not bother that there may be many actions in a play, but they must all be subservient to the great one, which our language happily expresses in the name of under plotts coordination in a play is as dangerous and unnatural as in a state. Dryden uses the coordination in the sense first recorded by the OED for 16 43 of positioning on an equal level.
But it has to be said that in many double plotted novels, the two plots seem to be getting on just fine without any threat of civil war. In fact, they cooperate in producing a coherent meaning. Point ten suggests five different kinds of meaning which can be generated. The first is ethical comparison. Elinor and Marianne Dashwood represent excesses of sense and sensibility, respectively, but the novel leans more ultimately toward the side of Sen's.
At the chronological beginning of Wuthering Heights, the Heights and the Grainge represent respectively a deficiency and an excess of civilisation which render both of them unsustainable. The fact that the location of continuation through compromise is the heights, however, suggests the novel's bias.
Howards End starts in the hands of the capitalist Wilcox's at the end of the novel, it is the site of the Union of the Wilcox's and the Eagles, but in the future, it will pass to a best Schlegel Helen's illegitimate son by Leonard Bast. So a place of plangent beauty must, according to the dynamics of the novel, eventually reconcile cultures and bring English classes closer together.
In Arnold Bennett's 1998 novel, The Old Wives Tale, Constance and Sapphire Bane's are sisters brought up in the Midlands town of Bursley. Their names are a give away the constant. Constance marries a man called Mr Povey and helps him to run a drapery shop. Her sophisticated sister, Sapphire, however, elopes with a travelling salesman who then abandons her in Paris.
After spending a while down-and-out in Paris, she builds up a successful Ponson and in her last years is reunited with her sister back in Bursley. The novel is not quite sense and sensibility, though each sister's disposition has particular consequences for for her at the stage in history at which she lives.
But the novel is not a sermon to constancy. It is a tale of Two Cities, which plays with its binaries as it mediates, so as it meditates on the variety of human life across time, space and person.
Double plotted novels can also generate irony's Charlotte Bronte's Shirlee sets up certain expectations of marriage prospects or otherwise of contrasting friends Caroline Helstone and Shirley Kielder before challenging them and our understanding of character by marrying the self expressive, wilful Shirley to the taciturn but dominant Louis More and the tender, submissive Caroline to the Robert Moore, who had displayed so much affinity for Shirley.
In other words, double plotted novels deliberately wrong us. A third important function of double plots in the 19th century can be to explore the different experiences of men and women. Consider Nicholas Nickleby. At the beginning of the novel, a brother and a sister are left in the same situation, penniless by their father, and they part company in order to make their livings. Nicholas first goes to do the boys haul in Yorkshire and then to the south of England, where he joins an acting troupe.
While Nicholas travels, Kate remains stationary in London, where she is forced to defend herself from the latter's advances of a mulberry hawk. And he was only finally rescued when her brother returns. George Eliot's Romola partly disrupts this trope that you could see repeatedly infection of a stationary woman and a roaming man. In 15th century Florence, the lovely Romola marries the morally anaemic Tyto.
His increasingly treacherous involvement in Florentine politics prompts Romola to make her own interventions and twice to run away from Florence Titos plot to do him no good. And he ends up dead on the banks of the Arno. But nor can Romola finally break away. Her attempts to save her family come to nothing. She is finally always impelled back to her own place, the woman's place, caring for the weak and the sick.
Inside Florence, an archetypal expression of geographic gender difference appears a century later in the 1957 novel Phos by the American novelist Patrick White. Laura Trevelyan is a young lady of Sydney High Society. In the 40s, she meets the German explorer Phos VLS just before he sets out to lead an expedition across the bush from east to West Australia.
They establish a telepathic connexion, which they maintain for the rest of the novel, even though she remains in her comfortable Sydney house whilst he encounters the dangers of the bush. The fourth kind of dynamic which I listed is the decomposition of one person's traits between two characters for the purposes of analysis. So here I want to take a German example. Hemen Hess's 1930 novel, Not systemD Cold, wouldn't set in the Middle Ages.
It concerns a monastic teacher, Narcis, who represents the male Apollonian, godly, logical and scientific, and his golden haired pupil, Goldmann, who one day out gathering herbs discovers sex and spends the rest of the rest of the novel embracing the Dionysian, the artistic, the expansive, the female and the sexual. The conversations of these two close friends, all the conversations of an ordinary soul, a split one with itself.
In a related case a decade earlier of Steve landed us and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, the different parts of the soul keep missing each other and even at the end of a thousand pages and an entire odyssey could hardly be described as close friends. So far, the types of meaning which I've been offering have been synchronic, that is, they lack the dimension of time. Double plotted novels often do explore time, though.
Wuthering Heights, the most Geographe, the most geometric novel I can think of is split two ways along the axes of space and time. There were the heights and the grainge and the first and the second generations. So it's the square. The second operates as a function of the first in that the relationship between the houses are worked out through the transition of the generations.
Of course, all of these novels are vastly more complex than I've just described them, but I would suggest that the relations between their dominant plots are not obviously perplexing or enigmatic. For the rest of this lecture, I just like to consider a few cases of double plotted novels, which I think do present interpretive problems. So the kind of problems involved are listed in point eleven.
Let's take Bleak House, you have the first person retrospective narrative of Esther Summerson, which mainly concerns life at the eponymous Bleak House and the third person present tense narrative, which is concerned, particularly with Lady Dedlock and the courts of Chancery. You might think that the connexion between the narratives is revealed to us and Esther progressively over the novel and that the two heroines are shown to be related not only by blood,
but a lawsuit. But the notion that everything in Bleak House is connected to everything else by the fog of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce is itself a notion which folks the relation between the narratives remains problematic, in part because they are two different kinds of narrative as to tells us that she's uncertain to begin her part of the narrative because she is sure she is not clever. She knows then that she is participating in a collaborative venture.
But the identity and indeed the substantiality of the three quarters omniscient third person narrator is never made clear. Nor then is their relation. This is a gulf at the heart of the novel into which meaning can fall. In other cases, a novel which seems to set up an ethical contrast but never quite supports it.
Vanity Fair is a good example of this. The amoral gold digging Becky Sharp and her mild, loving childhood friend, a media sadly part ways as soon as they leave school for the rest of the novel, they go through ostentatiously parallel situations, finding a husband, having a child, losing a husband, being ruined and finding another husband. They ought to constitute an ethical binary, but they don't cause and effect connexions between. Their stories are often set up and then fail.
We may at any given moment favour one character over the other, as the narrator also does. But this narrator does not allow us to rest in the favouring of either one. Thackeray famously said. I want to leave everybody dissatisfied and unhappy at the end of the story. We all we ought all to be with our own and all other stories.
The reader, as the hermeneutic sister, Wolfgang Eser points out, is forbidden from resting either in superior detachment from or sympathetic involvement with either of his protagonists, Becky represents comedy. Emilia pathos and the fabric of the novel is unstable and iridescent with both. In this case, the failure of binary didacticism is acknowledged by the rhetoric of the novel itself, in other, yet more complex cases, the failure seems not to be acknowledged.
D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love offers what seems to be a startling example of narrative eschatology. On the one hand, there are Ursula and Birkin who escape from the Alps into Italy. And although yet they end the novel admittedly, famously in the middle of an argument and they have no idea where they're going to spend the rest of their lives. The prospects for their marriage seem relatively within the novel good. On the other hand, there is the couple, Gerald and Gudrun.
Gerald ends up frozen at the top of the Alps. Gudrun appears and disappears to Dresden with a bisexual paedophilic, say this artist called Lurker and is not heard of again. So by virtue of what to the fates of these two couples diverge so widely, even between marriage and death.
In his review of Women in Love, John Middleton, Murray Lawrence's sometime friend expressed bewilderment that the relationships of the two couples, which he found to be indistinguishable as characters purported to represent, quote, supreme realities positive and negative of a plan of consciousness. The white race has yet to reach. Leading one pair to undreamed of happiness might be overstating it.
And the other two attempted murder and suicide. In fact, these two couples can be distinguished in certain ways in Gudrun and Gerald, it could be argued what Lawrence calls the flux of corruption dominates over the flux of creation. Their connexion is principally one of lust. Their moments of greatest sexual intensity are described as degenerative rather than transcendent. In addition, I think the narrative punishes Gerald for refusing to plead to Schaft blood brotherhood with Burkin.
But the reader is forced to work at those distinctions and may be unconvinced by them as a justification of the divergent fates of the couples, even when they think they found them. In other words, to some extent, I think that Gerald is being scapegoated for his rejection of Birken, and the massive divergence of the fates isn't quite justified by the actual spiritual distinctions of those two couples.
Finally, I wanted to come on to Daniel Deronda, one of the most famously problematic double plotted novels in the English language, its two plots concern Daniel, a young Englishman who discovers that he is a Jew, marries a Jew and at the end of the novel, leaves England on a Zionist mission to Palestine. And Gwendolyn Hollis, a young English woman who makes a disastrous marriage to a sadistic aristocrat called Grandcourt and appeals to Daniel as her spiritual adviser.
Now, that's the connexion of the two stories. Gwendolyn's and Daniel's meetings throughout the novel, Daniel is himself the linchpin character being connected by adoption to the family that Gwendolyn marries into, but she's increasingly involved with Jewish characters who are nearly all of a lower social class than his own. So he is the connecting factor. But despite that, I would say that the Jewish and the gentile halves of the novel are strikingly disconnected.
Most of the Gentiles never meet most of the Jews. Many of the characters in this novel aren't even aware of the existence of the other set of characters. Gwendolyn is half aware that her spiritual adviser, Daniel, is becoming increasingly interested in Jews. And at one moment in the novel, she spends a few minutes in a room adjacent to one of the novel's most important Jewish characters, Mordechai. But she shows absolutely no interest in meeting him and therefore she never does meet him.
As far as Mordecai is concerned, it is not certain that he ever knows of the existence of Gwendolyn Harless, who takes up half of the novel in which he exists. Nor are the stories related by causation. Daniel's advice to Gwendolyn makes no difference to the fact that Gwendolyn marries or to the fact that her marriage ends. For his part, his connexion with her influences none of the major decisions of his own life.
No wonder that F.R. Leavis argued that what he called the good part of Daniel Deronda could be prised from the strongly and very questionably emotional part and simply reissued as a new novel called Gwendoline Harless. Now, there were various things one can make of the relations of these two plots, one of the most obvious is, again, ethical contrast.
Not only does the novel's rhetoric admire and approve of Daniel more than it does of Gwendoline, but it has a vision of renaissance for the Jewish people, whereas it presents a world of English gentility in both senses of the term gentility, which is spiritually and genetically moribund. The English characters have almost no religious faith, lacks sexual ethics, are in Matthew Arnold's sense, Philistines and when they reproduce, have only female children.
The novel indeed shows the influence of Darwin. The English upper classes, it seems to suggest, are on the way out, whereas new peoples such as Jews are on the rise. Indeed, it was the opposite response to a similar perception that fed the popular and state sponsored anti-Semitism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This, then, is one way of making sense of the novel, criticising the gentile world from the perspective of a deeper and healthier culture.
But I would say that doesn't quite work. It still leaves all kinds of problems. Gwendoline suffers a tragedy. Daniel tries to help but can't. What is the revelant? It's of relevance of Judaism or of Daniel's own comedy to this tragedy. You might argue that the novel is so thoroughly Darwinian that it doesn't actually care for individuals anymore, just the species, and Gwendolyn is a representative casualty of a declining species.
But the narration of those passages of the novel, which concern her, doesn't support that either. Crucially, Gwendolyn has no Judaism and she is a woman for both reasons. She can't just up stakes and move to Palestine. And for both reasons, comparison of her actions with Daniels is somewhat unfair. In fact, I would say the whole novel feels as though it's divided into two worlds and Gwendoline lives in the wrong one with no possibility of moving to the other.
The issue of Wolds requires a little expansion, a world, according to the OED, does not just mean the Earth and all created things upon it, but a group or system of things or beings associated by common characteristics and the sphere within which within which one's interests are bound up or one's activities. Find scope, like the world of golf, the world of hedge fund managing or of nanotechnology. In the context of a novel I will call such and into subjective world a domain.
It may be centred around one or a few characters, and its common characteristics may be geographical, social or aesthetic. Now the number of of my novels, domains and plots do not necessarily coincide. Think of Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, Jane Eyre, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Their eponymous protagonists travel across several different domains, Moule goes from Newgate to Virginia to Barthe to Lancashire to Maryland to Virginia. Tom meanders from Somerset to London via many social classes.
On the other hand, in many double plotted novels, the plots cohabit a domain sense and sensibility. Vanity Fair I mentioned that multiple plots in a novel can constitute a coherent world. In double plot of novels, you can get a stereophonic effect, as between Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, who between them constitute a three dimensional world of Vanity Fair. But there are other double plotted novels in which the two plots have two domains Bursley and Paris.
In the old wives tale, Sydney and the Bush enforce the monastery and the world in Naziism, Goldmans and Europe and little Jewish ghettos within it all the two domains of Daniel Deronda. In the last case, the domains are not just geographic, social and racial, but aesthetic. Many critics have commented that the two plots are written in different ways and have different narrative voices.
The narrator of Gwendolyn's domain is a drily witty gentile who is knowledgeable about Judaism but and also sharply critical of Gentile's. The narrator of Daniel's domain is an earnest person whose verbals style is suspiciously close to that of Daniel himself.
The first narrator observes with ironic understatement, we English are a miscellaneous people, the latter exemplifying the kind of read of writing that little straight she laughed at in the Victorian's, observes the velvet canopy never covered a more goodly bride and bridegroom to whom their people might more wisely wish offspring. The narrator of Gwendoline story would not write like that. The Gentiles tend to be more thickly described and they have more physical presence.
Gwendolyn is palpably antipathetic to sex. Grandcourt is palpably a sexual sadist. Myra and Mordechai, on the other hand, have no sexuality whatsoever. In the gentile domain. Animals such as horses and dogs and prawns are real. Whenever they turn up in the Jewish world, they are similes. There's also a difference of genres. The Gentile domain is a place of irony, pathos and individual tragedy.
The Jewish domain is one of national tragedy, national resurgence and in Daniel's case, an individual romantic comedy. In the latter, wildly improbable things occur and faith slot into place, for which reason Daniels story is sometimes called a romance. The Gentile domain is the more realistic world to which Henry James's portrait of a lady owes so much clearly could not have been written. But for Daniel Deronda.
So much of this novel strains to make the Jewish world relevant to the Gentile one and to make Daniel relevant and useful to Gwendoline, but the Jewish world is by definition, exclusive. And finally, the central characters have to part company. Daniel painfully shares the consciousness that the novel has that they and their stories have ultimately failed to meet.
This sense of disjunction between the two stories has been the dominant critical position for most of the time since the novel was published. The first reviewers complained about it. Some Jewish editions did the reverse of what Leavis proposed and simply cut out the Gentile half. But since the 1970s in particular, an increasing number of critics have argued that the novel is, in fact, coherent. The two novels are connected by hidden economies of imagery, of affect and of meaning.
I think that such critics have found a lot in the novel that is there, but I would voice a warning. Critics from the very outset of their education as such are trained to find meaning and for that reason can very easily overlook its absence. Barbara Hardy criticised the new critical propensity for demanding and finding coherence in multiple plotted novels.
She says, We insist that the largely loose, baggy monster has unity, has symbolic concentration, has patterns of imagery and a thematic construction of character. And in a result, the baggy monster is processed by our new criticism into something strikingly like the original streamlined James Beast. To return to our metaphor of the heads, we should not pretend to overhear the novel's two heads saying things to each other, which in fact they are not.
The new critical training which underlies consciously or not so much of what we do, makes us consider a work as a whole. But this note should make us this should not make us assume that any given novel is, in fact a well functioning organic whole. Nor should we necessarily accept what authors say about this. George Eliot expressed patience, impatience with readers who cut the book, Daniel Deronda into scraps and talk of nothing in it.
But Gwendoline, I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there. And she uses an organic metaphor for connexion within a single work of art. Six years before starting Daniel Deronda in notes on form in Art, she wrote that the highest form then is the highest organism, that is to say, the most varied group of relations, bound together in a wholeness which again has the most varied relations with all other phenomena.
Forms of art can be called higher or lower on the same principle as that, on which we apply these words to organisms. This in proportion to the complexity of the parts bound up into an indissoluble whole. Yet this metaphor, if tweaked, is also helpful. Daniel Deronda is an organism in which the vital organs work imperfectly together and which must die when their relationship breaks down altogether. The novel does not outlive the ultimate separation of Daniel from Gwendolyn.
I want to conclude by suggesting that one way of avoiding the overstep, of avoiding the overstatement of either disjunction or cohesion in this or any other double plotted novel is to consider the tension between the two impulses since the mid 1970s and increased. An increasing proportion of critics who have found Daniel Deronda to be disjunct have found significance in this disjunction.
They are divided between those who think that the disjunction was intentional and those who think that it was unintentional. I am with the latter group, but I think that the novel is nonetheless aware of its failure to connect Daniel's failure to help Gwendoline Judaism's failure to unite peoples. And I think that it is in this tension between cohesion and division that Daniel Deronda reveals particularly clearly the dynamics of many double plotted novels.
Peter Garrett, whose point-I whose book I've listed as the last point on the handouts, describes the meanings of Victorian multiple novels as dialogic in Bakhtin sense, since their form is neither single nor multiple focus that incorporates both. And it's in the interaction and tension between these structural principles that produces some of their most important and distinctive effects.
To regard to Victorian multiple multiple novel as instances of dialogic form is therefore not a solution to the problem of structure, but a way of reading their structure as inherently problematic. I would therefore advise you to be on the lookout for problems as well as solutions and key.