1 00:00:11,000 --> 00:00:14,210 OK, well, thank you for admitting the day change, 2 00:00:14,210 --> 00:00:23,660 you may already have realised that literature in form is an inadequate title for this ragbag of lectures and classes. 3 00:00:23,660 --> 00:00:30,080 Unreliable narration isn't a form, it's a mode. Comparative literature is. 4 00:00:30,080 --> 00:00:36,650 Well, I'm spending an hour discussing what comparative literature is next week, but that's not really formal either. 5 00:00:36,650 --> 00:00:43,220 But Russian formalism has something to do with form, though it's by no means exclusively concerned with it. 6 00:00:43,220 --> 00:00:47,360 That and check structuralism. You're all very welcome. Very warmly. 7 00:00:47,360 --> 00:00:54,320 Welcome to that's in week five in seminar room B, no prior knowledge of any relevant texts is needed, 8 00:00:54,320 --> 00:01:01,820 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. 9 00:01:01,820 --> 00:01:10,220 And then perhaps the oddity is what micro texts are just very short forms of literature, 10 00:01:10,220 --> 00:01:18,290 the haiku, for example, in poetry, but will be most of all looking at very short forms of prose. 11 00:01:18,290 --> 00:01:21,830 The micro story, which is a very short, short story, 12 00:01:21,830 --> 00:01:34,310 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. 13 00:01:34,310 --> 00:01:40,790 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 14 00:01:40,790 --> 00:01:46,070 thinking about the whole issue of very short forms of prose and how they can function as poetry. 15 00:01:46,070 --> 00:01:50,270 So that will be really an exercise in close reading. That's in sixth week. 16 00:01:50,270 --> 00:01:53,960 Yeah, the anomaly is next week. What is comparative literature? What indeed. 17 00:01:53,960 --> 00:02:00,680 And I've put scare quotes. They are scare quotes around the comparative because I think that's a strange adjective. 18 00:02:00,680 --> 00:02:07,760 And a lot of thought, as you may have found yourselves, already comes from a sense of irritation, 19 00:02:07,760 --> 00:02:11,150 a sense of irritation that something doesn't quite make sense. 20 00:02:11,150 --> 00:02:18,470 And as long as I've heard of such subject as a comparative literature, I've thought that it wasn't coherent, 21 00:02:18,470 --> 00:02:23,510 that there's something fishy about the way that adjective is operating in relation to literature. 22 00:02:23,510 --> 00:02:29,990 So next week, I want to take that apart. That's going to be fairly abstract. 23 00:02:29,990 --> 00:02:34,370 So any of you with a philosophical bent of mind may enjoy that. 24 00:02:34,370 --> 00:02:38,510 It's not that much to do with knowing different languages. That seems to be contingent. 25 00:02:38,510 --> 00:02:46,370 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. 26 00:02:46,370 --> 00:02:51,020 OK, for this week, multiple plotting. 27 00:02:51,020 --> 00:02:59,270 You may well yourselves have realised by now that the vocabulary of plotting in literary theory is vexed. 28 00:02:59,270 --> 00:03:10,370 So consider the first point on your hand out. The word plot was first used to refer to the outline of a literary work, 29 00:03:10,370 --> 00:03:17,660 which is correspondence to Aristotle's term Musso's in fifteen forty eight in the English language. 30 00:03:17,660 --> 00:03:23,030 Within half a century of that date, it meant by transference, 31 00:03:23,030 --> 00:03:32,030 a secret plan or project which had a dastardly end in mind, like blowing up the houses of Parliament. 32 00:03:32,030 --> 00:03:37,160 It was in the twentieth century that the term plot, though, became confused, 33 00:03:37,160 --> 00:03:47,180 and Forster pronounced confidently that, quote, The king died and then the queen died is a story. 34 00:03:47,180 --> 00:03:52,460 The king died and then the queen died of. Grief is a plot. 35 00:03:52,460 --> 00:03:59,690 The time sequence is is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. 36 00:03:59,690 --> 00:04:11,510 However, a decade earlier in Petrograd, Vladimir Orlovsky had made the distinction to be discussed further and week five between Fibular and Shusett, 37 00:04:11,510 --> 00:04:18,520 which is the difference between what happens and how it is told. 38 00:04:18,520 --> 00:04:31,330 These terms, McCluskey's terms, fabulous Fugit got translated into English as follows popular What Happens became story and Sujit, 39 00:04:31,330 --> 00:04:40,540 how it is told, became a plot. And these two senses of story and plot eventually trumped Faustus. 40 00:04:40,540 --> 00:04:48,390 So if you want to use these that binary distinction in Faustus sense, I would specify that that's what you're doing. 41 00:04:48,390 --> 00:04:56,310 But I think that these translations of these Russian formalised terms have been unfortunate, 42 00:04:56,310 --> 00:05:02,400 they're slightly misaligned to the common usage in English of both of those words. 43 00:05:02,400 --> 00:05:07,500 If you ask someone to tell you the plot of Twelfth Night, 44 00:05:07,500 --> 00:05:15,570 they're not likely to give you a scene by scene summary, which would be plot in the structuralists sense. 45 00:05:15,570 --> 00:05:23,790 They're likely instead to tell you a rough outline of the developing relationships of the noble characters Orsino, Olivia and Violence DeSario. 46 00:05:23,790 --> 00:05:29,340 Then what happens with the lower life prose speaking characters? Toby, first day and so on. 47 00:05:29,340 --> 00:05:35,100 And then they'd interpolate backwards to Sebastian's actions on the island, saying something like and by the way, Viola, 48 00:05:35,100 --> 00:05:43,320 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. 49 00:05:43,320 --> 00:05:53,160 The word story, on the other hand, is often used to refer to a whole object rather than an abstract deduced from it. 50 00:05:53,160 --> 00:05:58,680 One does not sit a child down and read the main plot, but there it is. 51 00:05:58,680 --> 00:06:09,120 We get used to using these terms in the new review, in the new reverse sense of their colloquial meanings when speaking narrative logically. 52 00:06:09,120 --> 00:06:15,060 And then the story gets even more confused of the plot with the front French structuralists. 53 00:06:15,060 --> 00:06:27,390 The French translator translate Fabiola by either Histoire or Kunt and Superjet by either Racey or discolour. 54 00:06:27,390 --> 00:06:34,920 Some structuralists like Colores prefer to use the term story and discourse to story and plot. 55 00:06:34,920 --> 00:06:41,520 But then that adds yet another burden to the already overburdened word discourse. 56 00:06:41,520 --> 00:06:51,420 If anything comprehensible has emerged from all of this, then it then it promptly gets thrown by the term multiple plotting. 57 00:06:51,420 --> 00:07:00,150 When we talk about Middlemarch, say, being multi plotted, are we not in fact saying that it has multiple stories, 58 00:07:00,150 --> 00:07:09,600 for example, the stories of Dorothea of Liftgate and of Mary Garthe rather than their plots as narrated in the novel? 59 00:07:09,600 --> 00:07:15,000 So in the term multiple totted, we have to accept that plot means story. 60 00:07:15,000 --> 00:07:24,120 But if we accept that Dorothea and litigate and Marie have their own plots in Middlemarch, then another problem arises. 61 00:07:24,120 --> 00:07:34,020 Could it not be objected that Kassabian, Rosewoman, Vincey, Fred, Vincey, also have their own plots, as in fact do Selya, 62 00:07:34,020 --> 00:07:41,520 Fairbrother, Brooke Gladstone, Mr Bulstrode, Mrs Bulstrode Raffles and the Middlemarch Gosset Mrs Called Wallaga does not. 63 00:07:41,520 --> 00:07:49,710 In fact, every character who appears in a novel, perhaps more than once you might like to say, have their own plot. 64 00:07:49,710 --> 00:07:55,170 And therefore there are always as many plots in novels as there are characters. 65 00:07:55,170 --> 00:08:05,650 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. 66 00:08:05,650 --> 00:08:11,710 I don't think you need to think about that question for long to realise that there is a critical 67 00:08:11,710 --> 00:08:20,710 benefit to making a distinction between works with one obvious centre and works with multiple centres, 68 00:08:20,710 --> 00:08:33,670 for example, between Adam Bede and Middlemarch or between Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights or between Oliver Twist and Bleak House. 69 00:08:33,670 --> 00:08:42,220 So what we are doing in making this distinction is, in fact, discerning the number of dominant plots in a novel. 70 00:08:42,220 --> 00:08:51,100 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 71 00:08:51,100 --> 00:08:59,650 or a closely interconnected group of characters which have roughly equal significance to each other, 72 00:08:59,650 --> 00:09:08,210 but are not dominated by any other of significantly greater importance in that novel. 73 00:09:08,210 --> 00:09:15,440 And by importance in that novel, I don't just mean textual space. 74 00:09:15,440 --> 00:09:27,440 There are several other criteria which, according to whatever your critical biases and predilections are, may be felt to determine importance. 75 00:09:27,440 --> 00:09:33,470 For example, how far one story helps to interpret another. 76 00:09:33,470 --> 00:09:41,900 To what extent it is dominated by Jacobsson, the check structuralist by his poetic function. 77 00:09:41,900 --> 00:09:47,120 How hetero glossy it is to use Bastion's term, 78 00:09:47,120 --> 00:09:55,460 to what extent it affects a shift in the reader's horizon of expectations to use reader response vocabulary. 79 00:09:55,460 --> 00:10:04,640 How many of ECES interpretative gaffes it allows to the reader, how much didactic import it carries, 80 00:10:04,640 --> 00:10:12,380 how accurately it represents the world through perhaps its balanced tensions or its topicality, 81 00:10:12,380 --> 00:10:19,700 or whether it is atypical or whether it involves an important human problem or a painful, 82 00:10:19,700 --> 00:10:26,870 urgent or admirable emotion, or whether that story belongs to a sympathetic character. 83 00:10:26,870 --> 00:10:35,390 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. 84 00:10:35,390 --> 00:10:40,580 I said that dominant plots are roughly equal importance. 85 00:10:40,580 --> 00:10:48,380 You don't have to consider Dorothea's and Litigates plots in Middlemarch as of exactly equal importance 86 00:10:48,380 --> 00:10:54,830 to recognise that they both overwhelm the importance of the plots of Mr. Brooke or Mrs Cadwallader, 87 00:10:54,830 --> 00:11:00,500 and also to see that there were no other plots which are more important than theirs. 88 00:11:00,500 --> 00:11:03,950 The same is true of plots and subplots in drama. 89 00:11:03,950 --> 00:11:10,880 By the way, when we come to thinking about middle multiple lotting, there's not much theory on this subject around. 90 00:11:10,880 --> 00:11:18,140 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. 91 00:11:18,140 --> 00:11:26,300 So King Lear is double plotted in having a plot, which is Lears and a subplot which is Gloucester's. 92 00:11:26,300 --> 00:11:30,580 But you certainly wouldn't describe the play's single Plotted. 93 00:11:30,580 --> 00:11:38,230 It's not by coincidence that all the examples of novels I've taken so far are from the 19th century, 94 00:11:38,230 --> 00:11:42,580 if you run your mind across the 18th century novels, you know, 95 00:11:42,580 --> 00:11:55,180 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, 96 00:11:55,180 --> 00:12:05,800 Robinson Crusoe, Moll, Flanders, Clarissa, Pamela, Shamila, Tristram Shandy. 97 00:12:05,800 --> 00:12:15,370 In the 19th century, the novel expanded in terms of numbers, readers, sales and prestige, if not length. 98 00:12:15,370 --> 00:12:22,450 And we see that novels also increase in the number and complexity of their plots. 99 00:12:22,450 --> 00:12:30,790 Look at point three on your handouts and try to find a single centre to Wuthering Heights. 100 00:12:30,790 --> 00:12:36,970 Sense and Sensibility, surely. Vanity Fair. 101 00:12:36,970 --> 00:12:52,180 Nicholas Nickleby. A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Felix Hult, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, all of these have more than one dominant plot. 102 00:12:52,180 --> 00:12:55,630 Many were written between the eighteen forties and the eighteen seventies. 103 00:12:55,630 --> 00:13:01,630 And I would suggest that it is that period in which multiple plotting was at its height. 104 00:13:01,630 --> 00:13:05,590 Serial publication and a realist wish to reproduce. 105 00:13:05,590 --> 00:13:15,160 The multiplicity of life itself are just two of the factors which in this period favoured the multiplication of plots. 106 00:13:15,160 --> 00:13:25,300 And in a different way, the wish I wish to reproduce the multiplicity of life itself also animated the modernists think of Ulysses. 107 00:13:25,300 --> 00:13:31,270 Mrs. Dalloway. The waves, the rainbow. 108 00:13:31,270 --> 00:13:37,960 All of which have multiple centres, you'll notice that only a few of these novels, 109 00:13:37,960 --> 00:13:52,360 the ones I've printed in bold point to multiplicity in their titles, Sense and Sensibility, A Tale of Two Cities Point Counterpoint. 110 00:13:52,360 --> 00:14:02,710 Some have geographical names which can set out the space within which multiple actions occur, Vanity Fair or Middlemarch, but some, 111 00:14:02,710 --> 00:14:13,120 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. 112 00:14:13,120 --> 00:14:16,270 Daniel Deronda, as has been often pointed out, 113 00:14:16,270 --> 00:14:24,910 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. 114 00:14:24,910 --> 00:14:29,710 Wuthering Heights is as much about Rush cross-grained. 115 00:14:29,710 --> 00:14:33,430 And in this case, in these cases, it's always worth asking, 116 00:14:33,430 --> 00:14:42,970 is the named character or place that which the novel is asking its readers to favour often, but not always. 117 00:14:42,970 --> 00:14:54,220 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? 118 00:14:54,220 --> 00:15:02,130 Do the plots in their interrelations amount to anything greater than the sum of the parts? 119 00:15:02,130 --> 00:15:08,280 This is a question which we are relatively used to thinking about in relation to early modern drama. 120 00:15:08,280 --> 00:15:15,060 What is the relationship of the plot to the subplot of King Lear is a standard and expected exam question. 121 00:15:15,060 --> 00:15:23,610 We are not similarly used to thinking about the relationship of the Septimus Smith plot to the Mrs. Dalloway plot, 122 00:15:23,610 --> 00:15:30,420 in part because, as I say, within studies of the novel, it's an undeveloped area of theory. 123 00:15:30,420 --> 00:15:34,260 Henry James and I can't count the number of times which I've already quoted. 124 00:15:34,260 --> 00:15:45,240 This is famous quotation from James already in lectures of this year, once famously asked of the newcomers Lihua Mustaf and War and Peace. 125 00:15:45,240 --> 00:15:53,100 What do such large loose body monsters with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary artistically mean? 126 00:15:53,100 --> 00:16:03,780 The question in relation to multiple shotted novels to revise his question is what do such many headed monsters actually mean? 127 00:16:03,780 --> 00:16:11,560 Do their heads point to each other and have a coherent conversation which may be overheard and summarised? 128 00:16:11,560 --> 00:16:17,040 Or do they point away from each other and refuse to to converse? 129 00:16:17,040 --> 00:16:22,380 Or perhaps they do speak to each other, but in different languages. 130 00:16:22,380 --> 00:16:27,700 And if they speak, what do they speak about? 131 00:16:27,700 --> 00:16:37,420 Before I start to try and answer those questions, I want to introduce a further distinction that between the two headed work, 132 00:16:37,420 --> 00:16:43,240 the Zaphod Beeble Brocks of the novel world and the work with more than two heads, 133 00:16:43,240 --> 00:16:51,220 the hydra of the novel world, to this end, my vocabulary is going to have to go through a further mutation. 134 00:16:51,220 --> 00:16:57,160 The prefix multi will now be used to refer to more than two. 135 00:16:57,160 --> 00:17:07,330 So I'm going to be distinguishing double plotted novels from multi plotted novels considered point five. 136 00:17:07,330 --> 00:17:13,330 One of the features of double plots is that they can often be clearly distinguished as such, 137 00:17:13,330 --> 00:17:21,970 it is clear that Sense and Sensibility and Daniel Deronda and Ulisses have two main protagonists, 138 00:17:21,970 --> 00:17:27,140 but it is not so clear how many dominant stories there are in Middlemarch. 139 00:17:27,140 --> 00:17:34,210 I've suggested three so far, but some critics consider that there are four or more. 140 00:17:34,210 --> 00:17:43,120 An early critic of war and peace compared that novel to an Indian Idol, three heads or four faces and six arms. 141 00:17:43,120 --> 00:17:51,670 So he wasn't sure how to count war and peace. And in fact, there is no critical agreement on that question either. 142 00:17:51,670 --> 00:17:59,200 Apparently, paradoxically, multiplicity can make it easier to understand the relations of plots to each other. 143 00:17:59,200 --> 00:18:06,490 What we have in Middlemarch is the world of an English Midlands town in the early eighteen thirties. 144 00:18:06,490 --> 00:18:13,030 All of the different plots are connected by this town and can be related to it. 145 00:18:13,030 --> 00:18:19,200 And conversely, these plots between them create this world. 146 00:18:19,200 --> 00:18:27,090 No character is wholly divorced from any other, either in terms of their causal impact on each other's lives, 147 00:18:27,090 --> 00:18:39,840 however mediated or in terms of interprete ability, they exist in the same world of fiction as well as the same fictional world war. 148 00:18:39,840 --> 00:18:47,160 And peace is a more complicated case because it does have two kinds of action as named in the title, 149 00:18:47,160 --> 00:18:56,610 and it covers everywhere from Prussian battlegrounds to Siberian drawing rooms to prisons to the St. Petersburg court. 150 00:18:56,610 --> 00:19:02,220 But the novel is rightly called an epic, since it concerns the fate of a country. 151 00:19:02,220 --> 00:19:07,680 And Russia is the mediating concept of the whole novel. 152 00:19:07,680 --> 00:19:15,930 In both of these novels, Middlemarch and War and Peace, the multiplicity of stories between them guarantee a single world of time, 153 00:19:15,930 --> 00:19:25,920 space and discourse, just as in realist painting where the implied perspectives are infinite. 154 00:19:25,920 --> 00:19:31,980 So in this kind of realist novel, the implication of the multiple stories is that there could be, 155 00:19:31,980 --> 00:19:37,110 and in fact is an infinity of stories existing in that world. 156 00:19:37,110 --> 00:19:42,390 They just haven't all been narrated or not, or with the same level of detail. 157 00:19:42,390 --> 00:19:47,720 This set up also allows many different kinds of investigation to take place. 158 00:19:47,720 --> 00:19:53,790 A single situation may be studied in several different characters. 159 00:19:53,790 --> 00:20:02,970 So, for example, the situation of a man in a morally conflicted situation is explored in Litigate and Bulstrode and Fairbrother. 160 00:20:02,970 --> 00:20:09,420 The situation of a young wife frustrated by her husband is explored in Dorothea and very differently. 161 00:20:09,420 --> 00:20:16,560 Rosamond. The implication of these comparisons may be the great range of human character and 162 00:20:16,560 --> 00:20:22,440 experience or those comparisons and may actually generate the reverse conclusion. 163 00:20:22,440 --> 00:20:26,820 The things that litigate and Bulstrode have in common, despite their great differences, 164 00:20:26,820 --> 00:20:34,400 may be thought to point to the limited range of human nature and the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. 165 00:20:34,400 --> 00:20:44,200 The case of a novel which is clearly double plotted is rather different look at Figure six and think of the stars. 166 00:20:44,200 --> 00:20:51,250 If you see three stars, you are likely to see a triangular constellation, 167 00:20:51,250 --> 00:20:58,870 five stars might be Cassiopeia, a million stars, the Milky Way, War and Peace. 168 00:20:58,870 --> 00:21:10,630 But given two stars as shown in Figure seven, you could be forgiven for seeing them as two separate stars rather than a constellation. 169 00:21:10,630 --> 00:21:17,860 Perhaps because they are all they make up between them is a one dimensional object, a line, 170 00:21:17,860 --> 00:21:24,280 whereas once you have three points, you have two dimensions and therefore a shape. 171 00:21:24,280 --> 00:21:33,040 Henry James, again, point eight, had a mortal horror of two stories, two pictures in one, 172 00:21:33,040 --> 00:21:38,170 the reason for this was the clearest my subject was immediately under that disadvantage, 173 00:21:38,170 --> 00:21:43,810 so cheated of its indispensable centre as to become of no more use for expressing 174 00:21:43,810 --> 00:21:50,890 a main intention than a wheel without a hub is of use for moving a cart. 175 00:21:50,890 --> 00:22:03,820 Dryden Point nine had a politicised distrust of such parity when two actions are equally laboured and driven on by the writer. 176 00:22:03,820 --> 00:22:12,400 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, 177 00:22:12,400 --> 00:22:23,770 which our language happily expresses in the name of under plotts coordination in a play is as dangerous and unnatural as in a state. 178 00:22:23,770 --> 00:22:33,200 Dryden uses the coordination in the sense first recorded by the OED for 16 43 of positioning on an equal level. 179 00:22:33,200 --> 00:22:42,770 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. 180 00:22:42,770 --> 00:22:48,530 In fact, they cooperate in producing a coherent meaning. 181 00:22:48,530 --> 00:22:55,310 Point ten suggests five different kinds of meaning which can be generated. 182 00:22:55,310 --> 00:22:58,880 The first is ethical comparison. 183 00:22:58,880 --> 00:23:11,260 Elinor and Marianne Dashwood represent excesses of sense and sensibility, respectively, but the novel leans more ultimately toward the side of Sen's. 184 00:23:11,260 --> 00:23:13,930 At the chronological beginning of Wuthering Heights, 185 00:23:13,930 --> 00:23:23,980 the Heights and the Grainge represent respectively a deficiency and an excess of civilisation which render both of them unsustainable. 186 00:23:23,980 --> 00:23:33,620 The fact that the location of continuation through compromise is the heights, however, suggests the novel's bias. 187 00:23:33,620 --> 00:23:42,950 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, 188 00:23:42,950 --> 00:23:50,780 but in the future, it will pass to a best Schlegel Helen's illegitimate son by Leonard Bast. 189 00:23:50,780 --> 00:24:03,430 So a place of plangent beauty must, according to the dynamics of the novel, eventually reconcile cultures and bring English classes closer together. 190 00:24:03,430 --> 00:24:14,290 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. 191 00:24:14,290 --> 00:24:24,580 Their names are a give away the constant. Constance marries a man called Mr Povey and helps him to run a drapery shop. 192 00:24:24,580 --> 00:24:32,610 Her sophisticated sister, Sapphire, however, elopes with a travelling salesman who then abandons her in Paris. 193 00:24:32,610 --> 00:24:43,180 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. 194 00:24:43,180 --> 00:24:45,760 The novel is not quite sense and sensibility, 195 00:24:45,760 --> 00:24:53,230 though each sister's disposition has particular consequences for for her at the stage in history at which she lives. 196 00:24:53,230 --> 00:25:01,900 But the novel is not a sermon to constancy. It is a tale of Two Cities, which plays with its binaries as it mediates, 197 00:25:01,900 --> 00:25:08,060 so as it meditates on the variety of human life across time, space and person. 198 00:25:08,060 --> 00:25:18,740 Double plotted novels can also generate irony's Charlotte Bronte's Shirlee sets up certain expectations of marriage prospects or otherwise of 199 00:25:18,740 --> 00:25:28,970 contrasting friends Caroline Helstone and Shirley Kielder before challenging them and our understanding of character by marrying the self expressive, 200 00:25:28,970 --> 00:25:35,240 wilful Shirley to the taciturn but dominant Louis More and the tender, 201 00:25:35,240 --> 00:25:40,820 submissive Caroline to the Robert Moore, who had displayed so much affinity for Shirley. 202 00:25:40,820 --> 00:25:45,670 In other words, double plotted novels deliberately wrong us. 203 00:25:45,670 --> 00:25:55,480 A third important function of double plots in the 19th century can be to explore the different experiences of men and women. 204 00:25:55,480 --> 00:26:03,250 Consider Nicholas Nickleby. At the beginning of the novel, a brother and a sister are left in the same situation, 205 00:26:03,250 --> 00:26:08,680 penniless by their father, and they part company in order to make their livings. 206 00:26:08,680 --> 00:26:15,070 Nicholas first goes to do the boys haul in Yorkshire and then to the south of England, where he joins an acting troupe. 207 00:26:15,070 --> 00:26:24,970 While Nicholas travels, Kate remains stationary in London, where she is forced to defend herself from the latter's advances of a mulberry hawk. 208 00:26:24,970 --> 00:26:29,650 And he was only finally rescued when her brother returns. 209 00:26:29,650 --> 00:26:39,760 George Eliot's Romola partly disrupts this trope that you could see repeatedly infection of a stationary woman and a roaming man. 210 00:26:39,760 --> 00:26:47,170 In 15th century Florence, the lovely Romola marries the morally anaemic Tyto. 211 00:26:47,170 --> 00:26:51,910 His increasingly treacherous involvement in Florentine politics prompts Romola to make 212 00:26:51,910 --> 00:26:57,820 her own interventions and twice to run away from Florence Titos plot to do him no good. 213 00:26:57,820 --> 00:27:03,790 And he ends up dead on the banks of the Arno. But nor can Romola finally break away. 214 00:27:03,790 --> 00:27:06,550 Her attempts to save her family come to nothing. 215 00:27:06,550 --> 00:27:13,180 She is finally always impelled back to her own place, the woman's place, caring for the weak and the sick. 216 00:27:13,180 --> 00:27:15,610 Inside Florence, 217 00:27:15,610 --> 00:27:27,550 an archetypal expression of geographic gender difference appears a century later in the 1957 novel Phos by the American novelist Patrick White. 218 00:27:27,550 --> 00:27:32,050 Laura Trevelyan is a young lady of Sydney High Society. 219 00:27:32,050 --> 00:27:43,990 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. 220 00:27:43,990 --> 00:27:49,450 They establish a telepathic connexion, which they maintain for the rest of the novel, 221 00:27:49,450 --> 00:27:56,820 even though she remains in her comfortable Sydney house whilst he encounters the dangers of the bush. 222 00:27:56,820 --> 00:28:08,070 The fourth kind of dynamic which I listed is the decomposition of one person's traits between two characters for the purposes of analysis. 223 00:28:08,070 --> 00:28:18,000 So here I want to take a German example. Hemen Hess's 1930 novel, Not systemD Cold, wouldn't set in the Middle Ages. 224 00:28:18,000 --> 00:28:30,930 It concerns a monastic teacher, Narcis, who represents the male Apollonian, godly, logical and scientific, and his golden haired pupil, Goldmann, 225 00:28:30,930 --> 00:28:38,850 who one day out gathering herbs discovers sex and spends the rest of the rest of the novel embracing the Dionysian, 226 00:28:38,850 --> 00:28:43,500 the artistic, the expansive, the female and the sexual. 227 00:28:43,500 --> 00:28:52,310 The conversations of these two close friends, all the conversations of an ordinary soul, a split one with itself. 228 00:28:52,310 --> 00:28:57,800 In a related case a decade earlier of Steve landed us and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, 229 00:28:57,800 --> 00:29:02,030 the different parts of the soul keep missing each other and even at the end of a 230 00:29:02,030 --> 00:29:08,810 thousand pages and an entire odyssey could hardly be described as close friends. 231 00:29:08,810 --> 00:29:17,240 So far, the types of meaning which I've been offering have been synchronic, that is, they lack the dimension of time. 232 00:29:17,240 --> 00:29:22,730 Double plotted novels often do explore time, though. 233 00:29:22,730 --> 00:29:33,260 Wuthering Heights, the most Geographe, the most geometric novel I can think of is split two ways along the axes of space and time. 234 00:29:33,260 --> 00:29:38,210 There were the heights and the grainge and the first and the second generations. 235 00:29:38,210 --> 00:29:40,130 So it's the square. 236 00:29:40,130 --> 00:29:50,270 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. 237 00:29:50,270 --> 00:29:55,430 Of course, all of these novels are vastly more complex than I've just described them, 238 00:29:55,430 --> 00:30:05,630 but I would suggest that the relations between their dominant plots are not obviously perplexing or enigmatic. 239 00:30:05,630 --> 00:30:15,470 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. 240 00:30:15,470 --> 00:30:23,490 So the kind of problems involved are listed in point eleven. 241 00:30:23,490 --> 00:30:31,140 Let's take Bleak House, you have the first person retrospective narrative of Esther Summerson, 242 00:30:31,140 --> 00:30:38,430 which mainly concerns life at the eponymous Bleak House and the third person present tense narrative, 243 00:30:38,430 --> 00:30:43,920 which is concerned, particularly with Lady Dedlock and the courts of Chancery. 244 00:30:43,920 --> 00:30:49,710 You might think that the connexion between the narratives is revealed to us and Esther 245 00:30:49,710 --> 00:30:56,010 progressively over the novel and that the two heroines are shown to be related not only by blood, 246 00:30:56,010 --> 00:31:04,330 but a lawsuit. But the notion that everything in Bleak House is connected to everything else by the fog of Jarndyce 247 00:31:04,330 --> 00:31:11,890 versus Jarndyce is itself a notion which folks the relation between the narratives remains problematic, 248 00:31:11,890 --> 00:31:18,340 in part because they are two different kinds of narrative as to tells us that she's 249 00:31:18,340 --> 00:31:24,490 uncertain to begin her part of the narrative because she is sure she is not clever. 250 00:31:24,490 --> 00:31:29,890 She knows then that she is participating in a collaborative venture. 251 00:31:29,890 --> 00:31:40,570 But the identity and indeed the substantiality of the three quarters omniscient third person narrator is never made clear. 252 00:31:40,570 --> 00:31:49,600 Nor then is their relation. This is a gulf at the heart of the novel into which meaning can fall. 253 00:31:49,600 --> 00:31:58,090 In other cases, a novel which seems to set up an ethical contrast but never quite supports it. 254 00:31:58,090 --> 00:32:06,970 Vanity Fair is a good example of this. The amoral gold digging Becky Sharp and her mild, loving childhood friend, 255 00:32:06,970 --> 00:32:13,000 a media sadly part ways as soon as they leave school for the rest of the novel, 256 00:32:13,000 --> 00:32:27,400 they go through ostentatiously parallel situations, finding a husband, having a child, losing a husband, being ruined and finding another husband. 257 00:32:27,400 --> 00:32:34,840 They ought to constitute an ethical binary, but they don't cause and effect connexions between. 258 00:32:34,840 --> 00:32:39,490 Their stories are often set up and then fail. 259 00:32:39,490 --> 00:32:46,360 We may at any given moment favour one character over the other, as the narrator also does. 260 00:32:46,360 --> 00:32:52,000 But this narrator does not allow us to rest in the favouring of either one. 261 00:32:52,000 --> 00:32:59,890 Thackeray famously said. I want to leave everybody dissatisfied and unhappy at the end of the story. 262 00:32:59,890 --> 00:33:07,030 We all we ought all to be with our own and all other stories. 263 00:33:07,030 --> 00:33:10,810 The reader, as the hermeneutic sister, Wolfgang Eser points out, 264 00:33:10,810 --> 00:33:25,690 is forbidden from resting either in superior detachment from or sympathetic involvement with either of his protagonists, Becky represents comedy. 265 00:33:25,690 --> 00:33:34,270 Emilia pathos and the fabric of the novel is unstable and iridescent with both. 266 00:33:34,270 --> 00:33:41,590 In this case, the failure of binary didacticism is acknowledged by the rhetoric of the novel itself, 267 00:33:41,590 --> 00:33:49,040 in other, yet more complex cases, the failure seems not to be acknowledged. 268 00:33:49,040 --> 00:33:57,800 D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love offers what seems to be a startling example of narrative eschatology. 269 00:33:57,800 --> 00:34:04,280 On the one hand, there are Ursula and Birkin who escape from the Alps into Italy. 270 00:34:04,280 --> 00:34:07,070 And although yet they end the novel admittedly, 271 00:34:07,070 --> 00:34:12,650 famously in the middle of an argument and they have no idea where they're going to spend the rest of their lives. 272 00:34:12,650 --> 00:34:18,230 The prospects for their marriage seem relatively within the novel good. 273 00:34:18,230 --> 00:34:22,700 On the other hand, there is the couple, Gerald and Gudrun. 274 00:34:22,700 --> 00:34:26,660 Gerald ends up frozen at the top of the Alps. 275 00:34:26,660 --> 00:34:36,710 Gudrun appears and disappears to Dresden with a bisexual paedophilic, say this artist called Lurker and is not heard of again. 276 00:34:36,710 --> 00:34:47,040 So by virtue of what to the fates of these two couples diverge so widely, even between marriage and death. 277 00:34:47,040 --> 00:34:57,540 In his review of Women in Love, John Middleton, Murray Lawrence's sometime friend expressed bewilderment that the relationships of the two couples, 278 00:34:57,540 --> 00:35:03,870 which he found to be indistinguishable as characters purported to represent, 279 00:35:03,870 --> 00:35:09,360 quote, supreme realities positive and negative of a plan of consciousness. 280 00:35:09,360 --> 00:35:17,700 The white race has yet to reach. Leading one pair to undreamed of happiness might be overstating it. 281 00:35:17,700 --> 00:35:28,530 And the other two attempted murder and suicide. In fact, these two couples can be distinguished in certain ways in Gudrun and Gerald, 282 00:35:28,530 --> 00:35:36,030 it could be argued what Lawrence calls the flux of corruption dominates over the flux of creation. 283 00:35:36,030 --> 00:35:47,550 Their connexion is principally one of lust. Their moments of greatest sexual intensity are described as degenerative rather than transcendent. 284 00:35:47,550 --> 00:35:56,430 In addition, I think the narrative punishes Gerald for refusing to plead to Schaft blood brotherhood with Burkin. 285 00:35:56,430 --> 00:36:07,830 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, 286 00:36:07,830 --> 00:36:16,410 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, 287 00:36:16,410 --> 00:36:24,320 and the massive divergence of the fates isn't quite justified by the actual spiritual distinctions of those two couples. 288 00:36:24,320 --> 00:36:27,320 Finally, I wanted to come on to Daniel Deronda, 289 00:36:27,320 --> 00:36:36,470 one of the most famously problematic double plotted novels in the English language, its two plots concern Daniel, 290 00:36:36,470 --> 00:36:45,290 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. 291 00:36:45,290 --> 00:36:47,090 And Gwendolyn Hollis, 292 00:36:47,090 --> 00:36:57,350 a young English woman who makes a disastrous marriage to a sadistic aristocrat called Grandcourt and appeals to Daniel as her spiritual adviser. 293 00:36:57,350 --> 00:37:05,690 Now, that's the connexion of the two stories. Gwendolyn's and Daniel's meetings throughout the novel, 294 00:37:05,690 --> 00:37:13,310 Daniel is himself the linchpin character being connected by adoption to the family that Gwendolyn marries into, 295 00:37:13,310 --> 00:37:22,080 but she's increasingly involved with Jewish characters who are nearly all of a lower social class than his own. 296 00:37:22,080 --> 00:37:31,520 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. 297 00:37:31,520 --> 00:37:35,450 Most of the Gentiles never meet most of the Jews. 298 00:37:35,450 --> 00:37:41,690 Many of the characters in this novel aren't even aware of the existence of the other set of characters. 299 00:37:41,690 --> 00:37:49,910 Gwendolyn is half aware that her spiritual adviser, Daniel, is becoming increasingly interested in Jews. 300 00:37:49,910 --> 00:37:59,210 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. 301 00:37:59,210 --> 00:38:05,720 But she shows absolutely no interest in meeting him and therefore she never does meet him. 302 00:38:05,720 --> 00:38:12,620 As far as Mordecai is concerned, it is not certain that he ever knows of the existence of Gwendolyn Harless, 303 00:38:12,620 --> 00:38:21,500 who takes up half of the novel in which he exists. Nor are the stories related by causation. 304 00:38:21,500 --> 00:38:30,020 Daniel's advice to Gwendolyn makes no difference to the fact that Gwendolyn marries or to the fact that her marriage ends. 305 00:38:30,020 --> 00:38:36,890 For his part, his connexion with her influences none of the major decisions of his own life. 306 00:38:36,890 --> 00:38:44,450 No wonder that F.R. Leavis argued that what he called the good part of Daniel Deronda could be prised from the 307 00:38:44,450 --> 00:38:52,790 strongly and very questionably emotional part and simply reissued as a new novel called Gwendoline Harless. 308 00:38:52,790 --> 00:39:01,220 Now, there were various things one can make of the relations of these two plots, one of the most obvious is, again, ethical contrast. 309 00:39:01,220 --> 00:39:07,220 Not only does the novel's rhetoric admire and approve of Daniel more than it does of Gwendoline, 310 00:39:07,220 --> 00:39:11,090 but it has a vision of renaissance for the Jewish people, 311 00:39:11,090 --> 00:39:21,950 whereas it presents a world of English gentility in both senses of the term gentility, which is spiritually and genetically moribund. 312 00:39:21,950 --> 00:39:26,810 The English characters have almost no religious faith, lacks sexual ethics, 313 00:39:26,810 --> 00:39:34,190 are in Matthew Arnold's sense, Philistines and when they reproduce, have only female children. 314 00:39:34,190 --> 00:39:37,010 The novel indeed shows the influence of Darwin. 315 00:39:37,010 --> 00:39:47,990 The English upper classes, it seems to suggest, are on the way out, whereas new peoples such as Jews are on the rise. 316 00:39:47,990 --> 00:39:48,410 Indeed, 317 00:39:48,410 --> 00:39:58,670 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. 318 00:39:58,670 --> 00:40:09,140 This, then, is one way of making sense of the novel, criticising the gentile world from the perspective of a deeper and healthier culture. 319 00:40:09,140 --> 00:40:14,900 But I would say that doesn't quite work. It still leaves all kinds of problems. 320 00:40:14,900 --> 00:40:20,930 Gwendoline suffers a tragedy. Daniel tries to help but can't. 321 00:40:20,930 --> 00:40:31,130 What is the revelant? It's of relevance of Judaism or of Daniel's own comedy to this tragedy. 322 00:40:31,130 --> 00:40:37,760 You might argue that the novel is so thoroughly Darwinian that it doesn't actually care for individuals anymore, 323 00:40:37,760 --> 00:40:45,200 just the species, and Gwendolyn is a representative casualty of a declining species. 324 00:40:45,200 --> 00:40:51,110 But the narration of those passages of the novel, which concern her, doesn't support that either. 325 00:40:51,110 --> 00:40:57,540 Crucially, Gwendolyn has no Judaism and she is a woman for both reasons. 326 00:40:57,540 --> 00:41:07,220 She can't just up stakes and move to Palestine. And for both reasons, comparison of her actions with Daniels is somewhat unfair. 327 00:41:07,220 --> 00:41:13,130 In fact, I would say the whole novel feels as though it's divided into two worlds and 328 00:41:13,130 --> 00:41:19,430 Gwendoline lives in the wrong one with no possibility of moving to the other. 329 00:41:19,430 --> 00:41:28,730 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, 330 00:41:28,730 --> 00:41:35,000 but a group or system of things or beings associated by common characteristics and the 331 00:41:35,000 --> 00:41:40,280 sphere within which within which one's interests are bound up or one's activities. 332 00:41:40,280 --> 00:41:48,260 Find scope, like the world of golf, the world of hedge fund managing or of nanotechnology. 333 00:41:48,260 --> 00:41:54,650 In the context of a novel I will call such and into subjective world a domain. 334 00:41:54,650 --> 00:42:03,710 It may be centred around one or a few characters, and its common characteristics may be geographical, social or aesthetic. 335 00:42:03,710 --> 00:42:11,540 Now the number of of my novels, domains and plots do not necessarily coincide. 336 00:42:11,540 --> 00:42:19,290 Think of Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, Jane Eyre, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. 337 00:42:19,290 --> 00:42:25,170 Their eponymous protagonists travel across several different domains, 338 00:42:25,170 --> 00:42:31,830 Moule goes from Newgate to Virginia to Barthe to Lancashire to Maryland to Virginia. 339 00:42:31,830 --> 00:42:38,190 Tom meanders from Somerset to London via many social classes. 340 00:42:38,190 --> 00:42:45,630 On the other hand, in many double plotted novels, the plots cohabit a domain sense and sensibility. 341 00:42:45,630 --> 00:42:52,440 Vanity Fair I mentioned that multiple plots in a novel can constitute a coherent world. 342 00:42:52,440 --> 00:42:59,160 In double plot of novels, you can get a stereophonic effect, as between Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, 343 00:42:59,160 --> 00:43:04,740 who between them constitute a three dimensional world of Vanity Fair. 344 00:43:04,740 --> 00:43:12,510 But there are other double plotted novels in which the two plots have two domains Bursley and Paris. 345 00:43:12,510 --> 00:43:20,790 In the old wives tale, Sydney and the Bush enforce the monastery and the world in Naziism, 346 00:43:20,790 --> 00:43:30,930 Goldmans and Europe and little Jewish ghettos within it all the two domains of Daniel Deronda. 347 00:43:30,930 --> 00:43:37,200 In the last case, the domains are not just geographic, social and racial, but aesthetic. 348 00:43:37,200 --> 00:43:44,850 Many critics have commented that the two plots are written in different ways and have different narrative voices. 349 00:43:44,850 --> 00:43:57,660 The narrator of Gwendolyn's domain is a drily witty gentile who is knowledgeable about Judaism but and also sharply critical of Gentile's. 350 00:43:57,660 --> 00:44:06,310 The narrator of Daniel's domain is an earnest person whose verbals style is suspiciously close to that of Daniel himself. 351 00:44:06,310 --> 00:44:13,510 The first narrator observes with ironic understatement, we English are a miscellaneous people, 352 00:44:13,510 --> 00:44:19,870 the latter exemplifying the kind of read of writing that little straight she laughed at in the Victorian's, 353 00:44:19,870 --> 00:44:29,740 observes the velvet canopy never covered a more goodly bride and bridegroom to whom their people might more wisely wish offspring. 354 00:44:29,740 --> 00:44:39,820 The narrator of Gwendoline story would not write like that. The Gentiles tend to be more thickly described and they have more physical presence. 355 00:44:39,820 --> 00:44:48,040 Gwendolyn is palpably antipathetic to sex. Grandcourt is palpably a sexual sadist. 356 00:44:48,040 --> 00:44:52,990 Myra and Mordechai, on the other hand, have no sexuality whatsoever. 357 00:44:52,990 --> 00:44:59,290 In the gentile domain. Animals such as horses and dogs and prawns are real. 358 00:44:59,290 --> 00:45:06,100 Whenever they turn up in the Jewish world, they are similes. There's also a difference of genres. 359 00:45:06,100 --> 00:45:12,640 The Gentile domain is a place of irony, pathos and individual tragedy. 360 00:45:12,640 --> 00:45:22,150 The Jewish domain is one of national tragedy, national resurgence and in Daniel's case, an individual romantic comedy. 361 00:45:22,150 --> 00:45:32,980 In the latter, wildly improbable things occur and faith slot into place, for which reason Daniels story is sometimes called a romance. 362 00:45:32,980 --> 00:45:42,550 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. 363 00:45:42,550 --> 00:45:45,350 But for Daniel Deronda. 364 00:45:45,350 --> 00:45:54,680 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, 365 00:45:54,680 --> 00:46:02,360 but the Jewish world is by definition, exclusive. And finally, the central characters have to part company. 366 00:46:02,360 --> 00:46:10,940 Daniel painfully shares the consciousness that the novel has that they and their stories have ultimately failed to meet. 367 00:46:10,940 --> 00:46:17,870 This sense of disjunction between the two stories has been the dominant critical position for most of the time since the novel was published. 368 00:46:17,870 --> 00:46:28,060 The first reviewers complained about it. Some Jewish editions did the reverse of what Leavis proposed and simply cut out the Gentile half. 369 00:46:28,060 --> 00:46:34,840 But since the 1970s in particular, an increasing number of critics have argued that the novel is, in fact, coherent. 370 00:46:34,840 --> 00:46:42,370 The two novels are connected by hidden economies of imagery, of affect and of meaning. 371 00:46:42,370 --> 00:46:48,580 I think that such critics have found a lot in the novel that is there, but I would voice a warning. 372 00:46:48,580 --> 00:47:00,570 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. 373 00:47:00,570 --> 00:47:09,570 Barbara Hardy criticised the new critical propensity for demanding and finding coherence in multiple plotted novels. 374 00:47:09,570 --> 00:47:14,430 She says, We insist that the largely loose, baggy monster has unity, 375 00:47:14,430 --> 00:47:19,500 has symbolic concentration, has patterns of imagery and a thematic construction of character. 376 00:47:19,500 --> 00:47:30,970 And in a result, the baggy monster is processed by our new criticism into something strikingly like the original streamlined James Beast. 377 00:47:30,970 --> 00:47:33,100 To return to our metaphor of the heads, 378 00:47:33,100 --> 00:47:39,970 we should not pretend to overhear the novel's two heads saying things to each other, which in fact they are not. 379 00:47:39,970 --> 00:47:47,590 The new critical training which underlies consciously or not so much of what we do, makes us consider a work as a whole. 380 00:47:47,590 --> 00:47:57,670 But this note should make us this should not make us assume that any given novel is, in fact a well functioning organic whole. 381 00:47:57,670 --> 00:48:02,140 Nor should we necessarily accept what authors say about this. 382 00:48:02,140 --> 00:48:10,540 George Eliot expressed patience, impatience with readers who cut the book, Daniel Deronda into scraps and talk of nothing in it. 383 00:48:10,540 --> 00:48:16,360 But Gwendoline, I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there. 384 00:48:16,360 --> 00:48:21,880 And she uses an organic metaphor for connexion within a single work of art. 385 00:48:21,880 --> 00:48:30,460 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, 386 00:48:30,460 --> 00:48:38,290 the most varied group of relations, bound together in a wholeness which again has the most varied relations with all other phenomena. 387 00:48:38,290 --> 00:48:46,420 Forms of art can be called higher or lower on the same principle as that, on which we apply these words to organisms. 388 00:48:46,420 --> 00:48:54,520 This in proportion to the complexity of the parts bound up into an indissoluble whole. 389 00:48:54,520 --> 00:48:58,120 Yet this metaphor, if tweaked, is also helpful. 390 00:48:58,120 --> 00:49:08,200 Daniel Deronda is an organism in which the vital organs work imperfectly together and which must die when their relationship breaks down altogether. 391 00:49:08,200 --> 00:49:15,400 The novel does not outlive the ultimate separation of Daniel from Gwendolyn. 392 00:49:15,400 --> 00:49:20,140 I want to conclude by suggesting that one way of avoiding the overstep, 393 00:49:20,140 --> 00:49:27,160 of avoiding the overstatement of either disjunction or cohesion in this or any other double plotted 394 00:49:27,160 --> 00:49:35,050 novel is to consider the tension between the two impulses since the mid 1970s and increased. 395 00:49:35,050 --> 00:49:44,110 An increasing proportion of critics who have found Daniel Deronda to be disjunct have found significance in this disjunction. 396 00:49:44,110 --> 00:49:51,070 They are divided between those who think that the disjunction was intentional and those who think that it was unintentional. 397 00:49:51,070 --> 00:49:52,630 I am with the latter group, 398 00:49:52,630 --> 00:50:05,080 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. 399 00:50:05,080 --> 00:50:10,450 And I think that it is in this tension between cohesion and division that Daniel 400 00:50:10,450 --> 00:50:15,970 Deronda reveals particularly clearly the dynamics of many double plotted novels. 401 00:50:15,970 --> 00:50:20,650 Peter Garrett, whose point-I whose book I've listed as the last point on the handouts, 402 00:50:20,650 --> 00:50:26,380 describes the meanings of Victorian multiple novels as dialogic in Bakhtin sense, 403 00:50:26,380 --> 00:50:32,410 since their form is neither single nor multiple focus that incorporates both. 404 00:50:32,410 --> 00:50:41,260 And it's in the interaction and tension between these structural principles that produces some of their most important and distinctive effects. 405 00:50:41,260 --> 00:50:50,380 To regard to Victorian multiple multiple novel as instances of dialogic form is therefore not a solution to the problem of structure, 406 00:50:50,380 --> 00:50:55,300 but a way of reading their structure as inherently problematic. 407 00:50:55,300 --> 00:51:09,004 I would therefore advise you to be on the lookout for problems as well as solutions and key.