Dual-focus narratives begin by division into two antithetical groups or principles, both striving to govern the same space. The text serves to resolve the conflict and reduce duality to unity, subordinating all aspects of the narrative universe to a single, well-established system protected by rules assuring its continued existence and coherence. On this note of continuing unity, established values, and eternal return, dual-focus texts conclude. It is at precisely this point that single-focus texts begin. The dual-focus world is a cloistered realm: self-contained, timeless, oblivious to all but its own perpetuation. Those who would escape its bounds or regulations are promptly reduced to nothingness by exclusion from the text. Contrary to the characteristic self-sufficiency of dual-focus narrative, single-focus texts typically begin by an escape from the timeless stability of dual-focus values.
Either subservient and properly integrated into society or excluded as outlaws, dual-focus characters derive their identity from without, like children born into their parents’ religion. Dual-focus narrators endow characters with an identity, then accord attention to one character or another as they please. Single-focus narrators operate entirely differently. Not only do they accord liberty of conscience to individual characters, but also they consent to follow selected characters from incident to incident rather than measure each action by a preordained law, excluding exceptional individuals from the text. Whereas dual-focus characters are imprisoned from the start in a system that they cannot leave without also abandoning the text and thus their own lives, single-focus protagonists are represented as having chosen the single-focus mode over the dual-focus system into which they were born. It is this choice, inspired by the birth of personal desire, that captures the narrator’s attention and subordinates the following-pattern to a single protagonist.
We can best understand the specificity and importance of single-focus desire by contrasting the very different status of desire in the typical dual-focus pastoral plot, the “mythos of spring,” as Northrop Frye would have it. Whether in an Alexandrian romance like Daphnis and Chloe, Renaissance pastoral, Molièresque comedy, or American musical, at the heart of the plot lies a pair of young lovers thwarted by mistaken identity, persistent rivals, or the ever-present senex (old man). In each case, the plot turns on a series of binary oppositions (male/female, young/old, inside/outside) defining categories and determining character behavior. Desire in this situation is either “natural”—called forth, reinforced, and justified by one’s category—or entirely unnatural. Daphnis desires Chloe and vice versa, but only as a function of their sexual categories. Conversely, the senex violates his categorical imperative by becoming his son’s rival; he must eventually learn to act his age or risk exclusion from the new society formed around the young lovers.
If we sense a connection between the archetypal comic plot and the rite of spring, it is precisely because the characters’ roles are ritually determined. The lovers’ desire is a function not of their individuality but of the awakening earth pushing through them. As trees bring forth blossoms, as animals go into heat, so comic lovers play out their designated roles, gathering around them all who represent the New Year, while excluding supporters of the Old. Procreation is the normal result of these biologically grounded desires.
In single-focus narrative, however, desire for the opposite sex represents veiled narcissism, a thinly masked desire for selfhood and transcendence. Tristan doesn’t want Iseult; he wants obstacles, peril, and ultimately death (Tristan and Iseult). If Faust reels from desire to enjoyment with Gretchen, and yet in enjoyment longs for desire, it is because his true desire is to be like the gods (Goethe, Faust). Emma Bovary wants neither Rodolphe nor Léon but the ability to realize dreams (Flaubert, Madame Bovary). Julien Sorel yearns not for Mathilde but for control (Stendhal, The Red and the Black). Gatsby desires Daisy less than the power to destroy time and relive the past (Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby). Guido doesn’t want La Dolce Vita but something beyond life (Fellini, La Dolce Vita). The individual born of desire is always Adam, Lucifer, Prometheus. Caring less for the apple than its forbidden status, single-focus protagonists seek individuality by rejecting the codes established by the combined forces of God, father, and society.
No one has more eloquently described the relationship between noncategorical desire and a thirst for transcendence than Augustine, in the famous episode of the pear tree recounted in Confessions II:
The pears certainly were beautiful, but it was not the pears that my miserable soul desired. I had plenty of better pears of my own; I only took these ones in order that I might be a thief. Once I had taken them I threw them away, and all I tasted in them was my own iniquity, which I enjoyed very much. For if I did put any of these pears into my mouth, what made it sweet to me was my sin. (1963:47)
To eat, to seek nourishment, is a natural human activity, necessitated by our physical makeup. Augustine’s theft serves not to underline the biological needs he shares with others but to establish his individuality, to free him from categorical definition. Augustine’s desire thereby deprives the pears of their own specific identity. Seen from his perspective, they are not pears but signs of his individuality. Instead of being defined by biological processes and the law, Augustine seeks to redefine the world in terms of his own subjective vision and desire, thus abandoning the status of creature in favor of the role of creator. Augustine’s desire to become author of his own self, as he soon realizes, is none other than a yearning for the Author of All Being, a desire to be like God. Just as single-focus passion seeks self-definition rather than procreation, so Augustine’s appetite for pears serves not to satisfy a hunger for food but to quench a thirst for authorship.
In first-person narration, single-focus longing for self-creation is mirrored by a desire to tell one’s own story, listing accomplishments or confessing faults as markers of individuality. No such direct relationship exists in third-person narration, yet the narrator’s decision to follow the protagonist to the near exclusion of others clearly reveals the force and function of the central character’s desire. The narrators of Homer’s Iliad and Vergil’s Aeneid recount battles like mountaintop observers, concentrating first on one, then on another of the participants as they look down from their privileged belvedere. Dual-focus narration thus appears as separate from and superior to dual-focus action, for it is the aloof and omniscient narrator who seems to make the decisions about how the story will be told. The single-focus situation is quite different. .
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is usually treated as the story of the Ben-net house hold. Yet repeatedly during the novel, one of the five daughters leaves the family mansion to follow her own destiny elsewhere. Jane visits Caroline Bingley and stays with her aunt in London; Elizabeth walks in the rain to the Bingley mansion, visits Charlotte Lucas Collins at the Rosings parsonage, and travels northward with her aunt and uncle; Lydia vacations in Brighton, whence she runs off to London. The male characters are just as active in their wanderings. Mr. Bennet scours London in search of Lydia; Mr. Bingley shuttles between Netherfield and London; Wickham follows his regiment from Meryton to Brighton before fleeing to London; Darcy moves between Netherfield, London, Rosings, and Pemberley. Dual-focus treatment of these numerous comings and goings would no doubt involve careful pairing of male and female characters with highlighted scenes featuring their parallel thoughts: Jane’s and Bingley’s mutual doubts about each other’s affections, Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s seriocomic misestimations of each other, Lydia’s and Wickham’s devil-may-care desire, perhaps even Mr. and Mrs. Bennet’s radically different levels of involvement in their daughters’ affairs of the heart. Yet no such pairing exists in the following-pattern of Pride and Prejudice. Indeed, of all the many trips made by the novel’s large cast of characters, none can induce the narrator to leave the Bennet house hold save those made by Elizabeth. For, as E.M. Halliday has so aptly put it, “even a sleepy reader of this book must be well aware, before he has read very far, that it is Elizabeth Bennet’s story” (1966:431).
Whereas dual-focus narrators enjoy Olympian freedom and powers, the narrator of Pride and Prejudice appears to have accepted voluntary submission to the whims of Miss Elizabeth Bennet, following her wherever she goes, letting all others disappear from the narration whenever they leave Elizabeth’s side. It is not that this narrator does not know as much as that of The Iliad or The Aeneid; all are “omniscient” by traditional standards of narrative analysis. The difference lies in a voluntary limitation accepted by the narrator of Pride and Prejudice: following Elizabeth around like a reporter assigned to write her biography, independently of any interesting news occurring around her, this narrator gives an impression of subservience. As in The Scarlet Letter, the narrator of Pride and Prejudice seems less like the creator of a story, or even the objective recorder of history, than the amanuensis of the heroine. Throughout the single-focus tradition, the narrator appears to have abandoned all decisions to the character who is followed.
By usurping the dominant position in the following-pattern, the protagonist becomes the subject in relationship to whom all other characters and things remain objects. In dual-focus narration, the subject-object dichotomy is constantly broken down by the alternating following-pattern, which makes each focus subject and object in turn. Because both are subject as well as object, neither is either. This parallelism, this balancing, depends on a system where all members fulfill their categorical role. The enemies in dual-focus epic are pitted against each other not through personal desire but by a slot logic where they represent forces or groups that exceed individual interests. The very language of subject/object distinctions is inappropriate to texts like Prudentius’s Psychomachia, where the characters’ very names identify both their allegiance and their specific role. Is Ira (Wrath) subject and Patientia (Long-suffering) object, or vice versa? Generated by the tension between Virtue and Vice, they cannot be considered in terms of the subject/object dichotomy.
In the same manner, Dido’s suicidal wrath and Aeneas’s long-suffering pietas can never be reduced to the one-sidedness of a subject/object relationship because Dido and Aeneas are but specific embodiments of a more general quarrel between Jupiter and Juno in the heavens above. The same situation obtains in dual-focus pastoral, where the text’s very plot is designed to neutralize subject/object distinctions. According to the Neoplatonic philosophy that presides over Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, true love emanates not from individuals but from a higher order identifying two souls as destined for mating from their very birth. Dual-focus lovers desire not their opposite sex counterpart but fulfillment of their role within the system.
Suppose, however, that one partner refuses to return the other’s love. Suddenly the lover’s ego-investment increases, her desire is transferred from simple fulfillment of a categorical role to questioning of her very self. Rather than exemplifying sexuality, the character’s desire becomes invested with individuality. The loved one loses his independence and becomes redefined as a marker of the lover’s own state. This reorientation of the dual-focus love plot in subject/object terms provided one of the earliest and simplest methods of freeing the love theme for single-focus usage. An analogous method treats love or sensual desire as a forbidden fruit. Here desire is generated not as an exemplification of the character’s sexual category (as it is in, say, Daphnis and Chloe), but in spite of a more complex, culturally defined category (for example, the category of married woman in Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves). Instead of accommodating individuals to their biological or cultural category (the traditional function of dual-focus initiation), single-focus desire represents a purposeful attempt to evade either biological necessities like nourishment and procreation or the laws that provide individuals with their categorical starting points.
In fact, single-focus narrative often specifically identifies the protagonist as not fulfilling the expected biological role. One of the oldest of Western single-focus forms, the Christian saint’s life, commonly begins by a turning away from the twin requirements of society and nature. Just as the infant Saint Nicholas is traditionally represented in medieval statuary as refusing his mother’s breast (thereby expressing his preference for heavenly sustenance), so Saint Anthony, in the oldest and most influential of Christian vitae (Athanasius, Life of Saint Anthony), begins his saintly career—and his text—by abandoning his possessions and the world of men. In like manner, the Old French Vie de Saint Alexis, one of the most widely imitated of medieval vernacular saints’ lives, chooses the young man’s marriage night as his moment of separation both from human nature and tradition:
When he saw the bed and looked at the girl
Then he remembers his heavenly Lord
Whom he prefers to any earthly prize. (2000:vv. 56–58)
Alexis’s “wedding” to the church rather than to a charming virgin, Anthony’s bouts with sexual temptation, Nicholas’s refusal of his mother’s breast (Otloh, Life of Saint Nicholas), Cuthbert’s preference for prayer and spiritual sustenance over earthly food (Bede, Life of Saint Cuthbert), Hilarion’s fasting (Jerome, Life of Saint Hilaron), Martin’s decision to abandon his military career (Sulpicius Severus, Life of Saint Martin), Guthlac’s voluntary isolation (Felix, Life of Saint Guthlac)—all devolve from what Gregory the Great (“Homilies on Ezechiel”) calls “supernal desire,” the desire for transcendence that leads men to seek values above biology or society.
Having once shunned categorical functions, individuals remain free to apply their desire to other objects. Western literature often imitates at a distance the saint’s life’s tendency toward sublimation. In his diptych of “bachelor” novels—Le Cousin Pons and Le Curé de Tours—Honoré de Balzac regularly employs sexual metaphors to suggest that Pons and Birotteau have a more than natural love of their possessions. As confirmed bachelors, Pons the collector and Birotteau the priest have transferred to objects incapable of returning their affection the feelings that under “normal” circumstances would have been bestowed on a woman, thus assuring the continued applicability of the subject/object dichotomy. Whereas the reasons for the sublimation of Balzac’s bachelors are only hinted at, an entire generation of romantic heroes abandons sexuality out of a more or less overt fear of contamination by its dark, incestuous, overtones. François René de Chateaubriand’s René, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stendhal’s Octave (Armance), Balzac’s Louis Lambert, and Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau all sublimate their sexual desire in favor of transcendent goals unrelated to such base matters as sexuality. Like adultery, chastity is a method of going beyond normal marriage, of overcoming banality in favor of a particularizing voyage into unknown territory.
If dual-focus narrative serves to protect society and its laws, identifying them as cosmos and opposing them to chaos, single-focus texts regularly begin with an incursion into the chaotic world of non-value, the only place where individuality can be discovered and defined. The dual-focus system perpetuates the cultural canon, through exclusion or reduction of those who oppose it, whereas single-focus strategies promote development and preservation of the individual. This fundamental shift reorients the text’s imaginative geography. Dual-focus texts emphasize boundaries separating mutually exclusive worlds. Whether natural (the river Jordan isolating the Promised Land from all else, the Pyrenees splitting Charlemagne’s France from the land of the Saracens) or man-made (city walls, army stockades, family compounds), these boundaries oppose land cleared for human dwelling to unconquered chaos. Dual-focus pastoral inverts the pattern by transferring to the city the labyrinth metaphor once associated with wilderness. The dangers of the forest and the desert are now found in the low life of the city, where criminals and prostitutes take the place of beasts, ogres, devils, barbarians, and pagans.
Cosmos walled in and protected from chaos—such is the geographical constant of dual-focus narrative. To break through the barrier dividing the two worlds requires immense energy and unconventional purpose. Such energy and purpose are precisely what single-focus desire provides. Originally located within the warm womb of cosmos (family, court, city, laws), the protagonist’s first movement involves a plunge into the unknown, motivated precisely by the fact that it is unknown. As in Dante’s Divine Comedy, single-focus protagonists begin the adventures that make their tale worth telling by entering into a “selva oscura,” a dark wood to which they would bring light. Each single-focus subgenre derives its thematics from the specificity of its particular chaos. Obeying real historical considerations, the saint’s chaos takes the form of the desert. Inspired to live a more holy life, early confessor saints like Anthony and Paul of Thebes (as opposed to martyr saints, whose stories appear earlier and are invariably dual-focus), are represented by Athanasius and Jerome as quite literally walking out into the desert from the cities of northern Egypt. Other saints imitate their love of desert places. Sulpicius Severus’s Martin seeks out the caves surrounding Tours. Benedict, so Gregory informs us, first abandons his family in favor of Subiaco, then his monastery in favor of a narrow cave nearby. Bede’s Cuthbert finds solitude on the edge of his monastery, then greater seclusion still on the island of Lindisfarne. Felix recounts Guthlac’s departure for the marshes of Crowland. Brendan and others in the Irish imram tradition set out across uncharted seas (The Voyage of Brendan). In these cases and hundreds of others, the man of God shuns established values. His search for ever-greater isolation corresponds to a desire for increased exceptionality and individuality, albeit in the service of God.
The saint’s radical revision of established value structures offers an especially clear view of single-focus economics. Dual-focus narrative operates according to a zero-sum system. Since the division into inside/outside, us/ not-us is based on diametrical opposition between the two groups, one marked as positive and the other negative, the sum of the opponents’ values must always be zero: the elect’s positive value balancing the damned’s negative value. The geometry of the equal-arm balance assures this inverted equivalence and its nil sum. Martyrs’ lives (passiones) work according to this principle, with the Romans’ negative value balanced by the Christians’ positive value. The vita abandons this closed universe in favor of a new principle, that of gradation and its implied variable-sum game (Altman 1975). When Anthony leaves the city and its materialism, he does so without utterly condemning it; in fact, he gives away his money to the poor, suggesting that money does indeed represent some sort of value. Instead of simply reversing the accepted opposition of civilization’s plus value to the desert’s minus value (as the martyr saints do in destroying pagan idols), Anthony ushers in a new set of assumptions whereby life appears as a perpetual striving toward greater value. Money and the city are not bad; they are simply not as good as a solitary life of devotion to God.
This gradational approach appears most clearly in the myriad lives wherein the individual reaches eremitic status in two separate stages. First, he retires from society to a monastery, a movement that we might characterize as +/++, as opposed to the typical dual-focus +/− balancing. Once in the monastery, however, Benedict or Cuthbert soon continues his search for ultimate value by separating himself from the community in favor of solitary confinement. This second movement, opposing the hermit to the monk, says nothing pejorative about the monk’s status but identifies the anchorite as having increased his value by choosing the more difficult life. We must schematize this movement as ++/+++, because the saint has achieved still greater virtue than he established by his original departure from society.
With the secularization of the single-focus form, the gradational value structure is retained, not only in pious texts like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and William Langland’s Piers Plowman (with its clear delineation of value into good, better, and best categories), but also in picaresque tales of increasing success and stability from Lazarillo de Tormes to Alain René Lesage’s Gil Blas de Santillane. With the rise of the novel, the gradational value structure is further reinforced by a tendency toward economic stocktaking of the protagonist’s position in society, a development especially visible in the novels of Daniel Defoe and Pierre Marivaux. While the ledgers of Robinson Crusoe have become legendary, those of Moll Flanders are even more to the point here, for at the end of every episode Moll counts her coins, conning us into adopting her own monetary set of values. Through repeated financial and social evaluations of their current situation, Marivaux’s upstart peasants, Marianne (La Vie de Marianne) and Jacob (Le Paysan parvenu), consistently emphasize traditional single-focus gradational values. Gone is the dual-focus willingness simply to oppose good to bad. Here value is like a bank account—there is never so much that more cannot be added. Yet, as picaresque and psychological protagonists quickly discover, the fact that value can be increased implies that value can be reduced as well. Leaving one situation for another, investing one’s money in a cargo of uncertain worth, trading country calm for city bedlam—all such attempts at increasing value involve investments that are speculative at best, entailing the risk of losing goods, capital, value, and self.
If the saint’s trials take place in the desert, the romance knight sets out into an unmapped wasteland. Just as the hermit’s progression depends on a double separation and individualization—from society to cloister, then from monastery to anchorite life—so romance progresses through two stages. The would-be knight, whether Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival or Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming (The Red Badge of Courage), must first leave home in search of something more glorious than the familial fireside. Acceptance by the group, however, is no more conclusive in the medieval court than in a modern war novel like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. In order to achieve further individuation, the protagonist must abandon his community. When the Green Knight appears at Arthur’s court in the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain takes the opportunity to prove his own worth independently of the court’s established values. To his uncle Arthur he claims:
Bot for as much as year myn em I am only to prayse;
No bounté bot your blod I in my bodé knowe. (1974:vv. 355–56)
Praise deriving from lineage is insufficient for the romance knight. In The Song of Roland, Charlemagne is content to derive his power from God, from his Christian category, but Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain will not be satisfied until he confronts the mysterious Knight of the Magic Fountain. The medieval epic presents a job to be done, a society to be secured, but romance has other designs, for it is caught up in the individual’s desire to assert himself, to challenge the unknown in search of that which never was discovered by any knight before him—his own personal identity.
The quest for identity that informs medieval romance also invests the psychological novel. An important inversion has taken place, however, between these two incarnations of single-focus narrative. The saint’s life and the romance can conveniently be read as reactions to a dual-focus world in which the city or the court is seen as cosmos, while its surroundings are regarded suspiciously because of their potentially chaotic nature. Within this dual-focus epic configuration, protective of the civilized agglomeration, value adheres to those who defend the castle from the forces of evil without. The saint and the knight challenge the very dichotomy on which this system is based by searching for value alone, outside the walls, in the Egyptian desert or the forest of Brocéliande. In a later period when courts and cities have grown to a point where they no longer need fear for their own existence, dual-focus narrative reverses its field and identifies with the pastoral values now fast on their way to extinction. The unknown is no longer called wasteland, desert, or chaos, but “utopia”—nowhere. It is now positively valued and specifically opposed to the city’s degradation and sin. The Renaissance pastoral, the Enlightenment utopia, the Romantic serial novel, the Hollywood myth—all are taken in hand by dual-focus pastoral’s antiurban dichotomy.
It is in such an atmosphere that the single-focus novel develops. Dual-focus epic opposed the known to the unknown, marking the former as positive, the latter as negative. The thirteenth-century French knight could establish his identity by setting off into the unknown defined by twelfth-century epic, but the novelistic hero finds that the unknown has already been usurped by utopias, romances, and fantastic tales. His only alternative is to sally forth into the realm of the real. Renaissance pastoral was still thriving when Lazarillo set out to make his living as a blind man’s boy, or even when Cervantes’ Rinconete and Cortadillo ran away to Toledo, satisfying the reader’s curiosity along with the youths’ desire. Lesage’s Gil Blas, Marivaux’s parvenu peasant Jacob, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Balzac’s Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempré, Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau, Dickens’s David Copperfield, Zola’s Gervaise Macquart, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, and countless others begin their lives in the country only to seek the city when youth’s desire calls. The saint’s life and romance were based on an epic known/unknown disjunction, so both saint and knight met not the beasts of nature but the monsters of the unknown: demons, talking animals, ogres, giants. The novel sends its heroes into a swarming city defined by the ideal/ real dichotomy, so their tests are modeled on the very real evils that gave the city its bad reputation: criminals, prostitutes, swindlers, drunkards. The protagonists must thread their way through a maze, but in the first model, where the known is reserved for the proprietors of value, both the hero’s pathways and the skills used to navigate them successfully must take on the characteristics of the fantastic, while in the second model the heroine’s problems and solutions must reflect everyday reality.
Though they originally took shape to respond to specific historically conditioned dual-focus configurations, these two complementary single-focus approaches metamorphose rapidly in the modern world, providing cinema and the popular novel with some of their most persistent subgenres. The romance city-to-country plot, for example, is regularly reincarnated in what have come to be called “road films.” Like the romance or saint’s life, the road film begins with a discovery that established values are inadequate. Born of this recognition is a desire to hit the road, whether on a bike (Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider), in a car (Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde), or an airplane (M. Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point). The modern woman’s version begins as the woman collects her things but leaves her ring on the table, exchanging it for the keys to the family station wagon, creating an ironic image of her situation: she is free, but only to take the dog to the vet, do the grocery shopping, pick up the kids, and deliver them to their scout meetings. Only in the product of the society that she loathes, in the symbol of her enslavement to that society, can woman then set out in search of the Magic Fountain (Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People here standing for an increasingly large class of films).
Complementing the road film, with its implied cult of the countryside, we find the song of the city par excellence, the detective story. Dual-focus detective tales exist, firmly entrenched in the Dick Tracy tradition of Manichaean strife, thereby reiterating the clichés of a Romantic serial novel like Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris, where the hero’s clairvoyant sleuthing derives from his generalized perfection and immaculate representation of Good. True detective novels, however, feature a renegade detective—C. Auguste Dupin (Poe, Murders in the Rue Morgue), Sherlock Holmes (Doyle, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), Sam Spade (Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon), Inspector Maigret (Georges Simenon, Le Commissaire Maigret)—a complex individual in the Vidocq (Les Mémoires de Vidocq) tradition, more intent on proving his own mettle and retaining his independence than on simply solving crimes. It is the panache of Sherlock’s solutions that delights us, not the petty fact that he happens to have solved a crime through them. We react to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug” exactly as we do to his mystery/detective stories, yet the only crime in “The Gold Bug” is a hypothetical one, discovered quite by accident and alluded to only briefly. Our joy in reading this story comes from the clever solution of the cryptogram—the maze is unraveled, the chaos of symbols at last forming a coherent message. In just this way the detective reduces the city to an aspect of his own personality.
All single-focus narrative implies, in a certain sense, a departure into the unknown. Romance space opposes court to wasteland, but the dichotomy disappears as the knight proves his ability to cross the forest, to refrain from temptation, and eventually to recycle all that was once perceived as waste. In like manner, scientific space divides the known from the unknown, but single-focus texts bridge that gap as soon as the scientist’s Promethean desires are born. Faust’s overreaching leads him into a wasteland where religious, psychological, and sensual knowledge is both more complete and less orthodox than in the stable, conventional world that he leaves behind. Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, like the narrator in the novel’s epistolary frame, undertakes a voyage of discovery into the scientific unknown. Frankenstein is Promethean not only in his desire to create a human being without the assistance of his own creator but also in his relationship to the novel’s paternity. It is only through his desire that the story exists at all. Dual-focus texts operate like rituals, independent of the participants, for their categories can be actualized by any placeholder, but single-focus stories owe their very existence to individuals who usurp the text’s following-pattern through their desire. Even the intrusive narrator of Balzac’s La Recherche de l ’absolu appears to derive his story from his character’s search for an absolute, and not vice versa. Adam was created by God, but he is re-created by his own desire for knowledge.
A short excursus on the Adam story is apropos here, for the single-focus meaning of this essential myth gathers and emblemizes many aspects of single-focus narrative. The balance of Genesis may represent a dual-focus origin myth, but the Adam and Eve story can properly be read as a single-focus account of the birth of desire, repeatedly retold within single-focus texts.
Until the episode of the forbidden fruit, man’s purpose is described in strikingly simple fashion: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (1:28). Such an exhortation defines man in familiar categorical terms, with sex and social stature providing the only operative parameters.
The story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil breaks from this external categorical definition, a fact reflected in the names accorded at different points in the action to the two human characters. Before the transgression, the term ’adham (from ground = ’adhamah) is a collective singular, referring to man in general (2:17); only later will Adam become a proper name designating a particular man, a distinguishable individual (4:25, 5:1–3). Woman, before the fall, is simply ’ishshah (2:23), that is, “out of man” (= ish); not until the forbidden fruit has been tasted is she given her own name of Eve (3:20). Naming is an important aspect of single-focus beginnings because the desire to name oneself is tantamount to recognition that both patronymic and paternal values provide insufficient individuation. As a mark of his prowess, Chrétien’s Yvain earns the title of “Chevalier au Lion”; Gawain wants to establish the worth of his own name independently of his lineage; Quijada must change his name to Quixote before setting out on his quest (Cervantes, Don Quixote); James Gatz heralds his new life by taking the name Gatsby.
Adam and Eve gain more than new names through their transaction, however. As in The Scarlet Letter, a value speculation (risking secure, established values in order to maximize value), leads to an affirmation of the importance of spec-ulation, of point of view: “She took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (3:6–7). Nothing has changed in the outer world; Eden is still Eden, Man and Woman are still Man and Woman. But their action creates an inner world, where being depends on seeing, where the subject/object relationship is all important. This discovery of inner life evidently teaches them that words are not in a simple one-to-one correspondence to reality, because Adam’s response presumes ulterior motives in God’s first question. When God says “Where are you?” Adam hears an accusation and a threat. Instead of answering God’s question directly, Adam substitutes a narrative about his own perceptions and his own motivation: “I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (3:10). Just as the serpent capitalized on Eve’s desire to make her follow his argument, so Adam’s newfound individuality motivates this causal statement. The cause-and-effect arrangement of single-focus narrative depends on the stringing together of similar pronouns the way Adam does in his first speech: “I heard . . . I was afraid . . . I was naked . . . I hid.” God reacts just as Adam did. Adam heard God’s “Where are you?” as an effect that must have a cause (anger, he thought). God hears Adam’s speech in the same manner; he seeks to understand why Adam might speak in just that way: “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (3:11). And so on until the entire deed has been elucidated. This doubling of action is characteristic of the single-focus mode as a whole. Genesis 3 reads like a detective story, the narration of the crime giving way to an interrogation in which the evidence is made, through a series of cause-and-effect deductions, to reveal the author and motivation of the crime.
The only thing that permits God to solve the crime is Adam’s guilt. Were Adam able to disguise that, he could easily cover up all the evidence. This he cannot do, however, for the fruit conveys the twin attributes of the single-focus mentality: consciousness and conscience. Along with freedom of choice and knowledge of good and evil, Man gains the anxiety born of that knowledge. Before the fall, “the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed” (2:25), but once Man’s independence from God is asserted, concern for the wholeness and righteousness of the ego immediately follows. Adam’s knowledge conveys individuality but also self-deprecation and self-incrimination. Now he himself must decide whether or not he is guilty, whence his anxiety. Before the fall there was no ego, just as there could be no differentiation between superego and id; after the fall, human desire for individuation causes the split and the attendant inner complexity. Eve recognizes this complexity when she affirms that “the serpent beguiled me, and I ate” (3:13). How could Eve be beguiled if there were no distance between the voice of her id and that of her superego? The notion of guile makes sense only after this split.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Eden story involves a reversal in the relationship between God and man. Genesis 1 represents God’s style as performative and his language as creative: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (1:3). God names a category, and the universe daily reenacts that category. This is the very heart of the dual-focus ritual use of language. When Longus identifies Daphnis as a boy and Chloe as a girl, those categories are not inconsequential. We expect the characters to respond to this performative use of language (“And Longus said, ‘Let there be characters’; male and female he created them. And Longus blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’”). Man’s transgression changes all that. Now God’s discourse (“Where are you?” “Who told you that you were naked?”) depends on his creature’s action. Once, God created man and laid the ground rules for his conduct; now God must ask questions in order to establish the motivations underlying Adam’s action. Single-focus narrators follow protagonists like voyeurs, desirous of ever-more information about eccentric individuals. This is precisely the position into which Adam has forced God. Before, it was “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”; now an instantaneous performative has given way to a time-bound cause-and-effect interrogative: “And they knew that they were naked. . . . ‘Who told you that you were naked?’” Adam is now the perpetrator of his own acts, the creator of his own self, the author of his own text. He has thus merited his own personal name and instituted a new type of discourse independent of and opposed to God’s categories.
In dual-focus narratives, the law is the ultimate arbiter of access to the text. Those who fail to respect the law are eventually evicted from textual space, just as exile constitutes the ultimate punishment in the dual-focus community. Single-focus narratives reverse this situation, according textual space to individuals who break the law, violate a taboo, or flout accepted custom—in short, to “misfits,” as Nancy Armstrong (2005:27–28) aptly terms the exceptional individuals highlighted by the developing novel. Instead of reproducing dual-focus cyclical plots, emphasizing representative cases, single-focus texts exhibit a markedly linear character. Starting from a known point of departure, normally figured by an existing dual-focus society or situation, the single-focus protagonist sets off into the unknown, meets with extraordinary adventures, and hurries on toward an unknown destiny. Whereas a centripetal pull brings dual-focus narrative ever back to a famililar center, the centrifugal drive of single-focus narrative assures continuous investigation of the unknown. While the birth of desire assures liberation from the circle’s well-known contours, thus initiating the single-focus text, the remainder of the protagonist’s tale describes a trajectory that is anything but ritually predictable.
Dual-focus texts build cyclical plots around increasingly rapid alternation between the two foci, culminating in direct confrontation. The freedom accorded to—indeed, stolen by—the single-focus protagonist requires a fundamentally different strategy. Here the basic building block of the plot is not confrontation but choice. Whereas the operative concepts of dual-focus plotting may be expressed as the spatially conceived trio of this side, that side, and confrontation, single-focus texts turn on a temporal triad organized around a moment of decision: preparation, choice, and evaluation. For the romance hero, the decision may be as physical as which road to take; psychological novel choices stress the protagonist’s internal self-evaluation; the detective novel turns on logical deductions. Within each basic moment of the single-focus progression, certain characteristic attitudes regularly reappear.
For the character who views the moment of decision as an opportunity, the period of prospection is marked by dreaming, planning, or plotting. For these self-assured characters, the moment of decision itself is marked by exaltation, by full and open expression of the self, as when Hester Prynne celebrates removal of her scarlet letter by letting down her hair, accompanied by a sudden bursting forth of the sun. With the period of retrospection comes an expression of self-satisfaction, of boasting, of glorying in previous decisions—expressed in the detective novel by the sleuth’s self-satisfied account of the deductions that led to the successful conclusion of the case. For characters who view a decision with fear and trembling, however, this tripartite progression looks different indeed. The period of prospection is marked by insecurity and hesitation, such as that exhibited throughout the sentimental education of Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau. The moment of decision brings the anxiety defined by Kierkegaard as “the dizziness of freedom” (1980:61), a trademark of the existential novel. For protagonists lacking self-assurance, the period of retrospection is spent in regret, like that following Henry’s first battles in The Red Badge of Courage or La Princesse de Clèves’s initial demonstrations of love for Nemours. Additional interest can be produced by radical changes in self-assurance, such as the pastor’s transformed tone after he has reread his diary in André Gide’s La Symphonie pastorale or the revolution in Julien’s character at the end of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir.
Products of their own desire, single-focus protagonists owe their very textual existence to the liberty that they have taken with society’s customs and laws. Even real individuals follow this rule. Saints inspire stories only because they radically break with accepted values and practice. The pamphlets and ballads that were instrumental in the development of the novel in England invariably tell the story of a crime, meant to be sold on the day of the criminal’s hanging. In civil life, crime leads to punishment, but in textual life it is the crime that guarantees a place in the narrative, a text of one’s own. Freedom from the law may be prerequisite for admission into single-focus narrative, but freedom comes at a price. Anthony is tortured by demons, Yvain is nearly beheaded by a giant, Lazarillo almost starves to death, Moll Flanders marries her own brother, Emma Bovary is driven by debt to suicide, Gide’s immoralist loses all desire to live. Playing by definition a lonely role, single-focus protagonists are forever exiled from the conformity of the dual-focus community. But in the characters around them they invariably find models and motives for action. However important the single-focus protagonist may be for initiating the text, for providing the extra/ordinary decisions that make the story worth telling, the tale remains incomplete without the characters who influence and inform the protagonist’s behavior.
How do secondary characters fit into the single-focus pattern? What do we make of the role of the devil in the Adam and Eve story? How do we handle novels with several salient characters, like Balzac’s Père Goriot? Who is the main character of Homer’s Odyssey, and how does he relate to the others? If The Odyssey is simply the story of Odysseus, why do we follow his son for four full books before the hero of the Trojan war finally takes over the narrative? On the other hand, if this is Telemachus’s narrative, why is he abandoned for ten long books while we follow his father’s fate? Are the first four books an expanded introduction and Telemachus a secondary character? Or is the tale of Odysseus a simple included story meant to divert us from the relatively sparse central plot of Telemachus’s growth to manhood?
Support for both options comes from the distinguished literary reinterpretation of this classic. If some periods have rewritten the story of the wandering Ithacan, stressing his exemplary, dual-focus, heroic qualities, others have made the account of his son’s growth into the very type of the education of youth (especially in the wake of François Fénelon’s neoclassical treatise titled Télémaque). Neither of these readings can be either totally rejected or wholly accepted without doing serious violence to the text, however. By its interest and themes, as well as its metaphors and following-pattern, The Odyssey is fundamentally the story of two men, one thought dead and the other not yet fully living. The plot must bring two heroes to life, to full enjoyment of that which is theirs. Like Madame Bovary, The Odyssey provides two separate protagonists, granting each in turn the individuality of the single-focus hero. A clearer understanding of the relationship between the two will help explain why Homer yokes their stories together, making The Odyssey the story of two men and their relationship rather than that of a single individual.
From the very beginning, the stories of Penelope’s husband and son are mingled. Athene pleads eloquently to Zeus for Odysseus’s return home, but her first action is to “go to Ithaca to instil a little more spirit into Odysseus’ son” (Homer 1946:27), as if the father’s return were to depend on the son’s courage. Our first view of Telemachus is hardly encouraging on that score, for he is “dreaming of how his noble father might come back from out of the blue, drive all these gallants pell-mell from the house, and so regain his royal honours and reign over his own once more” (28). Far from depending on Telemachus’s courage, Odysseus’s prospective homecoming actually inhibits Telemachus: as long as the son maintains a vague hope that his father may return, he retains the privilege of doing nothing, dreaming about Odysseus’s return rather than asserting his own rights. Only sure knowledge of his father’s death would make Telemachus lord of his house, forcing him to master his own fate instead of relying on his absent father. Or so it appears.
Athene arouses Telemachus from his lethargy by calling on far deeper feelings than those of simple succession. “Are you really Odysseus’ son?” (30), she queries, implying that there is more to paternity than a simple physical relationship. When she assures Telemachus that his father will soon return, he suddenly realizes that he may shortly be called on by Odysseus to account for his behavior. Now “full of spirit and daring” (33), Telemachus realizes that his unseemly behavior will be looked on as that of a child who is not a fit son for one so great as Odysseus. The effect of Athene’s exhortations is immediate—Odysseus’s son claims to be master of the house and takes his father’s seat as he calls an assembly of the suitors. From that moment on, every one of Telemachus’s actions is defined by his relationship to his father, by his role of apprentice to his father’s model. When he goes looking for Odysseus, he is clearly searching for Odysseus-like qualities within himself as much as he is seeking his father. To be Odysseus’s son means to inherit his manly vigor, Athene suggests—one who is the true son of Odysseus will have no trouble finding him.
Not until father and son are reunited, however, do we realize the full human content of Athene’s questioning of Telemachus’s paternity. Odysseus has never seen his son as a young man and thus has no way of knowing whether the youth who claims to be his son actually is. “If you really are my son and have our blood in your veins,” says Odysseus, emphasizing once more that Telemachus has yet to prove that he is worthy of being called the son of Odysseus, “see that not a soul hears that Odysseus is back” (253). Shortly, Telemachus will prove his mettle, and in precisely the terms suggested by Athene in the first book: “I have learnt to use my brains by now and to know right from wrong,” claims Telemachus; “my childhood is a thing of the past” (312). He then proceeds to put such pressure on his father’s bow “that he might well have strung it yet, if Odysseus had not put an end to his attempts with a shake of the head” (319). Telemachus has finally succeeded in emulating his famous father.
If The Odyssey is the story of the old man finally returning home, it is also the story of the young man who leaves home in search of himself. Throughout, Odysseus serves Telemachus as a model, from long before they meet to the day their work is done. Only when Telemachus has succeeded in imitating his father, thus finally becoming his true son, can the text end. The reason for the presence of two “central” characters is now clear: the story of Telemachus’s progression toward a distant goal can be understood only if we can see how difficult a goal his father’s courage represents. Odysseus’s role as model must be expanded to display not only his courage and ingenuity but also his son’s emulation and ultimate acquisition of that same courage and ingenuity. The Odyssey thus builds on a standard single-focus pattern—the apprentice imitating the master—but the role of master is expanded so far that he outshines the youthful apprentice. When we read The Odyssey as a single-focus text built around Telemachus’s attempt to imitate the difficult model provided by his famous father, we are better able to account for the differing development of the two men than if we take Odysseus as protagonist of the text that traditionally bears his name. While Odysseus varies little from beginning to end, Telemachus develops from a child into a man during the course of the text.
The Odyssey joins other single-focus narratives in celebrating the accession of youth to maturity. Where dual-focus texts typically commemorate the replacement of one generation by the next, the single-focus approach stresses the successful emulation by one generation of its model in the previous generation. The Odyssey offers an account of apprenticeship, dramatizing the passing of knowledge from one age to the next. In Vergil’s Aeneid, Ascanius’s relationship to his father Aeneas is totally different, emphasizing only a slot to be filled. Throughout The Aeneid we fear that one master of the Trojans will be exchanged for another, knowing full well that Ascanius need not resemble his father in order to replace him in his military and administrative functions. In The Odyssey we watch the word “master” go through a series of mutations. At the outset, Telemachus must fulfill the functions of master of the house—greeting and feeding Athene, for example—but he is in no way master of himself; at the end, with Odysseus’s return, Telemachus loses all claim to be master of the house, but he is now master of himself and his fate, and thus paradoxically ready to become master of the house.
The Odyssey is an instructive text, indeed, for it clearly reveals the type of logic presiding over single-focus texts. Dual-focus secondary characters commonly differ from heroes and villains only in degree, not in kind. With the exception of the middleman, every character is aligned with one camp or the other. Not every character receives the same amount of attention, but in terms of structural significance, every character holds the same fundamental position. To read a text as single-focus, however, is to interpret all secondary characters according to the function they occupy in the protagonist’s story. Even Odysseus must be considered secondary when measured by the basic standards of single-focus narration: choice and change. A hero of The Iliad, Odysseus embodies the fundamental role that single-focus texts reserve for the heroes and villains of previous dual-focus texts—that of model, either negative or positive, for the neophyte anxious to break out of childlike dependence and into the freedom of adulthood.
Like Odysseus, the devil always seems to be on his way home from a dual-focus affair of epic stature. We are so accustomed to the Manichaean tradition where the devil is an independent source of evil, a worthy adversary for a benevolent God, that it is hard to imagine what function the devil or his agents might have outside their familiar dual-focus environment. The Adam and Eve story reveals just how important a role the forces of evil may play in single-focus narrative. It may seem strange to read the tale of Adam and Eve as a single-focus text centering on the human pair, when such an obvious dual-focus interpretation is available: God and the devil are locked in combat over the human soul. Indeed, this reading matches the dual-focus approach to the Old Testament commonly taken by medieval iconography, popular mythology, and earlier chapters of this book. It is inappropriate for the Adam and Eve story, however, for two essential reasons. The first concerns the rhetorical flow of the story, its following-pattern, and its thematic emphases. We never alternate between God and the serpent; instead, we follow the human couple, suggesting that their actions and reactions constitute the tale’s meaning. In addition, Eden’s serpent derives his force not from some independent Manichaean power source (like the primitive dragon, the early medieval pagan gods, or comic-strip villains) but from the desire of the characters themselves. He brings that desire out into the open, catalyzing their actions, but without their curiosity he can do nothing. The serpent is not an independent principle but a projection of human longings. He must be treated as a function of human desire, not as constituting a separate focus.
The dual-focus devil in his many incarnations is an independent power principle opposing the hero or group from without. Whereas the dual-focus devil is a barrier, a hindrance, an immobile force, the single-focus devil is a tempter, a far more ambiguous figure who can at best influence the protagonist’s decisions. The primary Old Testament meaning of the verb s’atan is persecution by hindering free forward movement. This description perfectly fits Israelite foes from the Amalekites to Ahasuerus. The New Testament presents the devil in a different light. Christ’s only confrontation with the devil occurs during the traditional forty days and forty nights in the desert. Matthew 4:8–10 recounts the third temptation in this way:
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Begone, Satan! for it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’”
This passage stands out for its mildness. Earlier Near Eastern tradition would have had the cultural hero battle the sea monster, destroy the enemy giant, or desecrate the altars to Baal. This Satan, however, requires no such force, for he exerts none himself. In fact, any astute reader will quickly infer that he has none to exercise or bestow. If he can really give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, then he could just as well take them for himself. Jesus has the power, not Satan. The tempter’s role is not to exert power but to divert the protagonist’s attention from his chosen object, to bring unconscious desires to the surface and to capitalize on them. In order to have power in single-focus texts, the devil must derive it from the very characters he tempts.
Western single-focus narrative may be conveniently divided into those texts where the devil’s plea is rejected and another, more interesting, class where acceptance of Satan’s offer sets the plot in motion. In the former class, we find texts modeled on Jesus’ example, such as the lives of saints from Anthony onward. In most of these texts the original impetus for the narrative is provided by a departure from society and its values. The devil’s plea is rejected as proof that the hermit’s commitment is total, that he is no longer susceptible to worldly pleasures. Because this devil offers the opportunity not for greater individuation but for a return to commonality, his plea must be rejected. Adam’s serpent, on the other hand, represents differentiation, departure, and transcendence. Promethean heroes, in a line stretching from Adam to Theophilus and Faust, all accept the devil’s offer, which promises to fulfill desires while assuring individuality. Far from fleeing the world, these heroes commonly begin their career by defiantly entering a world of mixed values, of uncertain morals, of risky but potentially lucrative endeavors.
The economics of transactions with the devil deserve a word here. Whenever such transactions are undertaken, they take on the character of speculation. The protagonist enjoys value A, or “morality” (peace, innocence, virtue); the tempter arrives and offers value B, or “reward” (rank, knowledge, money, or simply a new definition of morality). For this offer to become operative, the protagonist must desire B, whence the importance of desire for setting the single-focus system in motion. Once the devil’s offer is accepted, the protagonist gains B, but what of A? According to a popular medieval legend (as recorded, for example, by Rutebeuf in his Miracle de Théophile), Theophilus’s contract with Satan sets the soul as the cost of reward, but such a simple-minded barter could hardly delight the confirmed speculator. The birth of desire corresponds to a discovery that all value is not here, hic et nunc, within one’s category. Greater value may be available elsewhere. But with the discovery that value can be increased goes the risk that value will instead be decreased, for the first step toward greater value—willing abandonment of one’s own category and its built-in morality value—may also lead to a loss of value. Once the support of the family, the group, the category, has been lost, all certainty disappears. The gradational system characteristic of single-focus speculation thus features none of the cut-and-dried, once-and-for-all alliances of the dual-focus diametrical system. Dual-focus texts permanently position the individual, vis-à-vis value, from the start. In single-focus situations, speculation never stops. At every point there is a path that leads forward, as well as one that represents a falling back.
The single-focus open-ended system thus produces a radically new myth of personality. The dual-focus arrangement locates value clearly and inalterably, requiring characters either to accept that location or lose their place within the system. Individual personality has little place here. Since each character is expected to replicate the basic aspects of his or her category, individual variations are treated as nothing more than “accidental” differences. The single-focus approach, on the other hand, depends on a cluster of four closely related characteristics:
Gone are the certainty of dual-focus belonging and the simplicity of dual-focus decisions. Personality is instead governed by an impulse to maximize personal value, while protecting against risk and its accompanying anxiety. To gather rewards without foregoing morality—such is the hallmark of single-focus psychology. A forward look and a backward look, never the present. Dual-focus texts take place in the present, for past and future are nothing but aspects of the everlasting now, the static category, the timeless dimension of space.
Though the single-focus protagonist is in one sense a direct descendant of the dual-focus middleman, hesitating between competing values, single-focus characters are rarely content simply to abandon one set of values in favor of another. Single-focus speculation implies the desire to retain morality while maximizing reward or, in the case of the saint, to regain reward after having walked away from the world where it is the norm. Were the saint to abandon society’s rewards entirely, we would perceive him as simply setting up an alternative locus of value. His morality would be opposed to society’s reward, just as the martyrs’ virtue contrasts with the Romans’ riches or Lazarus’s poverty-cum-salvation is opposed to Dives’s riches-cum-damnation (Luke 16:19–31). The key to the single-focus vita, however, is that the saint’s slow ascent toward God restores the power and rewards that he seemed to have abandoned when he left the world. The difficulty of profiting from such a risky speculation is revealed by the fact that it takes miraculous events to assure the saint’s reward. Is Cuthbert hungry? An eagle appears to provide his supper. Is Benedict thirsty? A rock brings forth water. Is one of his associates in danger of drowning? God grants Benedict the power to perform a miracle in order to save him. When money is short, a purse is provided; when a storm threatens, a simple gesture quiets it; when old age finally takes its toll, the saint’s dead body remains incorrupt. When miracles are in short supply, the marvel of point of view must suffice: morality is reward enough because the saint has learned to endure fasting and pain.
Subjectivity’s sleight of hand proves even more useful in the novel. Having abandoned morality in favor of reward, the protagonist may conveniently grow blind to the value of morality or the fact that it has in fact been lost. In his first amorous episode, Jacob de la Vallée, Marivaux’s parvenu peasant, refuses to compromise his morality. Jacob is rewarded handsomely for marrying Geneviève, but only on the understanding that he will permit his wife to become the master’s mistress. “Wasn’t it Adam’s apple come back just for me?” Jacob asks, recalling the last three letters of his proposed bride’s name. Yet Jacob has no heart of stone. After refusing this first temptation, he soon succumbs to others—salvaging his pride by dissimulating their immorality. As he rises in society, reaping reward after reward, he covers his moral nakedness with a veil of rhetorical language designed to convince the reader that his speculation has been successful, that he has won his rewards without having to pay with the currency of morality. Unable to have both morality and reward, Jacob compensates for the loss of morality through point of view, through spec-ulation. Rhetoric thus becomes the device whereby the protagonist’s speculation succeeds. To paraphrase François de La Rochefoucauld, his rhetoric is the homage that reward pays to morality.
Miracle stories and unreliable narrators thus fulfill similar roles in the same system. Each represents a method of transmuting an even one-for-one trade (morality for reward or vice versa) into a profitable speculation. Each produces “immaculate conception” of the newly gained value, without tarnishing or abandoning the old. We have no more evidence of miraculous events than of Jacob’s virtue—in both cases only words—yet both, if they convince the reader, assure the success of the protagonist’s speculation. The ultimate result of this system is a Machiavellian utilitarianism, wherein the end justifies the means, the reward restoring in the eyes of the public the morality abandoned along the way. The following passage from The Prince could, with only minor changes, have been pronounced by Balzac’s archfiend, Vautrin, to Rastignac, Le Père Goriot’s quintessential young-man-on-the-brink-of-life:
Everyone sees what you appear to be, few touch what you are; and those few do not dare oppose the opinions of the many who have the majesty of the state defending them; and with regard to the actions of all men, and especially with princes where there is no court of appeal, we must look at the final result. Let a prince, then, conquer and maintain the state; his methods will always be judged honorable and they will be praised by all; because the ordinary people are always taken by the appearance and the outcome of a thing; and in the world there is nothing but ordinary people; and there is no room for the few while the many have a place to lean on. (Machiavelli 1964:149)
The option of morality or reward is thus not a simple choice but a complex game inviting players to devise a strategy whereby, in choosing one value they will not be required to abandon the other.
In The Odyssey, one character serves as an embodiment of the values that another is called to adopt. Balzac’s Le Père Goriot offers two models—Vautrin representing the pleasures of reward, Goriot figuring the sanctity of morality. Both aspire to a successful speculation, employing open allegiance to one value in the hopes of gaining the other as well. Under the influence of the title, generations of readers recall Le Père Goriot as the story of an old man who carries fatherly love to suicidal lengths. Often compared with Shakespeare’s King Lear for its repeated evocations of filial insensitivity, Le Père Goriot is given by some as the very type of Balzacian characterization, old Goriot embodying the novelist’s tendency to conjure up monomaniacal characters whose traits surpass and mythify the real world of their epoch.
The following-pattern of Le Père Goriot, however, tells quite another story. The entire exposition, excruciatingly long and detailed, seems specifically charged with disguising the novel’s true subject. As the narrator tours Madame Vauquer’s boarding house, each character is described at length. No character stands out as the novel’s subject or organizing principle, though the mysterious Vautrin and the retired pasta merchant Goriot do attract our attention. But as the exposition ends, it is Rastignac—the young student recently returned from the provinces with renewed ambition—who captures the narrator’s interest. From this point on, we leave the aspiring law student only once. While several scenes provide Balzac with the opportunity to describe social gatherings of every sort, it is always with Rastignac that we arrive, always with Rastignac that we leave.
What does Rastignac have that the others don’t? Why is he the book’s fil conducteur and our guide to Paris society? Simply because Rastignac shares with the author the ability to observe society. He alone serves as the subject of knowledge (collecting and disseminating knowledge) as well as the object of knowledge (about whom something is known). Time and again, it is Rastignac who discovers a salient detail about the residents of the Pension Vauquer. Our knowledge of Paris society is repeatedly gained through Rastignac. Plot organization also concentrates attention on the young provincial. For all other characters, the story’s November 1819 beginning is an unmemorable point on an unbroken and continuous time line. For Rastignac, however, that date represents the beginning of his Paris adventures, the starting gate for his ambition. Other characters enter into the plot, but only through Rastignac and his activities can the plot be adequately traced or represented. The novel’s following-pattern clearly identifies its single-focus affinities and the narrative importance accorded to Eugène de Rastignac.
But if Rastignac is designated by the following-pattern and his own perspicacity as the novel’s protagonist, then what role, structurally speaking, must we accord to the figures of Vautrin and Goriot, who loom large in every reader’s memory of Balzac’s novel? Constantly tempting Rastignac with respectability built on ill-gotten gains, Vautrin combines the attributes of Machiavelli’s Prince and Goethe’s Mephistopheles (indeed, Balzac’s novel contains many direct echoes of Faust, albeit it on a realistic register, including the duels that result in the deaths of Margaret’s and Victorine Taillefer’s brothers). Vautrin’s evaluation of the quagmire metaphor present throughout the novel could not be clearer. As Rastignac learns on his very first outing, it is difficult to navigate the muddy streets of Paris without being splashed with mud. Says Vautrin of the Parisian cesspool: “If it dirties your carriage as you pass, you’re respectable. If it dirties your feet, you’re a rogue” (Balzac 1965b:51). To come up in the world, the master-criminal implies, is to rise above bourgeois morality, and that can be accomplished only by those rich enough to ride by carriage, thus protecting riding coat and reputation alike. Madame de Beauséant, Rastignac’s worldly cousin, carries the carriage image a step further: “Look on men and women simply as post-horses,” she says, “and leave them behind as soon as they’re exhausted. In that way you’ll reach your goal” (82). Yet Madame de Beauséant is herself likened to a horse. Soon left behind by her own coachman, she amply demonstrates the risks involved in this Machiavellian system: when she loses her position in society, she is treated as if she had lost her morality as well.
Whereas “Papa” Vautrin tempts Rastignac with his get-rich-quick schemes (gain morality by maximizing reward), Goriot holds out the example of saintly self-sacrifice. The one serves as treasurer for criminals’ ill-gotten gains; the other gives away his hard-earned gold, devoting himself selflessly to his daughters in the expectation that they will care for him in his old age (gain reward by maximizing morality). Constituting Scylla and Charibdis in the Odyssey metaphor developed throughout Le Père Goriot, Vautrin and Goriot serve as constant models for the young Rastignac, who must steer a course between them in order to reach his proposed goals. Rastignac does indeed sail by, for he adopts neither Vautrin’s diabolical schemes nor Goriot’s virtuous passivity. In Balzac’s mythology, Rastignac is the one stable element, the one major character who is never caught up in the whirlpool of his desires or thrown on the rocks of misfortune.
But what permits Rastignac to navigate the straits without abandoning either his quest for reward or his slim hold on morality? He solves his problems through the same point of view that Marivaux used to assure the success of Jacob’s speculation in Le Paysan parvenu. Le Père Goriot is not narrated by Rastignac, however, so he cannot control the narration as tightly as Jacob. What Marivaux accomplishes through unreliable narration Balzac must achieve through the composition of a character who operates like his predecessor’s rhetoric. Rastignac must retain his ambition at all times but talk, instead, about his concern for moral integrity. He must learn to make a show of compassion for Goriot just as he is abandoning him on his deathbed. In short, he must create a personality mask just as Jacob relied on a mask built out of rhetorical style. Let him borrow all his sister’s savings, but if he wishes the virtue as well as the money, he must learn to regret her sacrifice out loud. Rastignac may have refused the devil’s compact, but Balzac has to turn him into something approaching a hypocrite in order to secure his speculation.
Like The Odyssey, Le Père Goriot is appropriately read as the single-focus tale of a young man in search of a father. If Homer’s text provides a single father figure, Balzac’s novel furnishes a pair of memorable models. Throughout the single-focus tradition, secondary characters concretize the protagonist’s potential paths. In The Divine Comedy, as in Le Père Goriot, much of the interest derives from the mysterious happenings to which the protagonist is witness. Yet far from representing a simple compendium of literary and real life characters, Dante’s text, like Balzac’s, always sets these visions in the service of the hero, providing positive and negative models that Dante the pilgrim must either imitate or avoid before he can proceed. In the same manner, Augustine’s Confessions implicitly oppose the example of his pious mother to that of his worldly father. Wherever we turn in the single-focus world, protagonists are surrounded in their quest by models of behavior against which we readers regularly measure their conduct.
How the single-focus protagonist handles the twin necessities of morality and reward (along with their embodiment in models like Goriot and Vautrin) constitutes a fundamental question in single-focus narrative. Dual-focus tales serve to illustrate the triumph of the group that constitutes its audience. Even when historical factors force the narrator’s side into temporary defeat (as in the martyr legends, The Song of Roland, the Negro spiritual, or Irish song), postulation of apocalyptic victory guarantees eventual domination. Dual-focus narrative cannot afford to admit defeat because of its role as defender of culture and perpetuator of society. Imagined victories, supernatural aid, and apocalyptic triumphs all collude to salvage that which history has erased. Single-focus narrative operates according to a similar principle, but where the dual-focus system protects categories, laws, and groups, single-focus texts guard individual egos against rupture. Single-focus protagonists have so much invested in their choices—which represent their desires and their individuality—that they cannot admit failure. They must adjust the facts, their interpretation, or the locus of values in order to assure the survival of their psyche, now understood as separate, individualized, and (from the point of view of the protagonist) valuable independently of categories, laws, and groups. Such tampering with the facts does not always go unpunished. If Rastignac achieves full socialization by accommodating his views to the reality of the situation, his contemporary Julien Sorel (in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black) eventually self-destructs out of recognition of the hypocrisy involved in his too great accommodation to the world’s values.
We can thus identify two typical results of the single-focus individuation process. “Reconciled” protagonists are progressively attuned to their limitations, having successfully negotiated the relationship between personal desire and the world’s strictures. Henceforth equally at home in the realms of morality and reward, they have accepted a compromise between the two. This is the situation of many saints (who often return to the world as bishops), of Chrétien’s Yvain and Erec (who at last learn to reconcile the twin demands of court and marriage), of Gawain (who, through his encounter with the Green Knight, experiences the Christian duality of man’s glory and sin), of Moll Flanders (who rapidly abandons use values in favor of exchange values), of Henry Fleming (who earns his Red Badge of Courage), of Rubashov (the hero of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, who convinces himself that the Communist Party’s mission is more important than his truthfulness), and of countless other heroes who adopt the precepts of Machiavelli’s Prince.
The romantic hero(ine), in contrast, rejects a life not big enough to contain both morality and reward. Goethe’s Werther cannot simultaneously maintain his respect for Lotte and become her sexual partner, so he kills himself. Faced with a similar conflict between purity and profanation, Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau simply avoids the problem, as does Chateaubriand’s René. Frankenstein, Julien Sorel, and Emma Bovary all sacrifice their lives rather than abandon their aspirations. They retain the profound disappointment of goals unachieved, power unconquered, dreams unrealized. These romantics retain to the breaking point their dream of becoming as gods. Their novels can end only with rupture from the world that has proven so inhospitable. They are truly what Georg Lukács (1963) and Lucien Goldmann (1964) have labeled “problematic heroes.”
The romantic hero(ine) cannot make peace with the world, as René Girard has shown (1961), because his or her desire is mediated by a previous literary figure whose unreal perfection constitutes an unimitatable model, an unattainable goal. In the larger perspective of the single-focus mode we recognize Girard’s mediator (Amadis for Quixote, Napoleon for Julien Sorel, Virginie and the Paris myth for Emma Bovary) as only one among a large class of figures who serve to catalyze the protagonist’s desire. We have already examined the workings of one of these catalysts, the tempter, who offers new rewards. The mediator plays precisely the same role, though in a more indirect fashion. Athanasius asserts that Anthony leaves home because he has heard about Jesus’ life and Christian precepts; Hilarion and Augustine (according to Jerome and Possidius) commence their spiritual careers in imitation of the stories told about Anthony. Parzival’s vision of knights in shining armor, followed by the kindling of his desire to become one of their number, stands as a fit emblem of romance mediation.
Yvain demonstrates the process of triangular desire still more clearly. Chrétien’s poem begins with a story designed to demonstrate what a man must do to gain individuality and win respect. At the outset, Yvain listens to Calogrenant’s tale of bewitched forests and enchanted castles, of magic fountains and difficult tests. What Yvain hears is an admission of defeat on the part of Calogrenant, who undertook the adventure but could not carry it through to successful completion. What Yvain sees, however, is reorientation of the court around the storyteller, instead of its titular head, Arthur. Calogrenant’s tale thus serves Yvain as an object lesson in the value of individuation. Only those who have undertaken unusual feats can capture the court’s attention, whether or not they have accomplished them successfully. Calogrenant’s story is part of Yvain’s poem because it serves as the goad and the model for his desire. In much the same fashion, Telemachus seeks a new identity only under the influence of his father’s model, forced on the young man by Athene, who understands fully the concept of triangular desire. Implicitly, all single-focus texts both begin and end with a story like that told by Calogrenant. The proper result of every single-focus adventure is the tale of the adventure, a legacy left by the single-focus protagonist to motivate other prospective single-focus protagonists. The end of one text thus serves as the logical beginning for another.
The Red Badge of Courage modernizes the concept of mediation by identifying the enormous influence of the yellow press. Long accustomed to the morality of home and mother, Henry Fleming now yearns to take part in “one of those great affairs of the earth” that he has read about in the “pages of the past.” Despairing of ever “witnessing a Greeklike struggle,” Henry’s ideas of war come directly from the most exciting battle literature of the nineteenth century—the newspaper:
He had burned several times to enlist. Tales of great movements shook the land. They might not be distinctly Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them. He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all. His busy mind had drawn for him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid with breathless deeds. (Crane 1960:117)
Intrigued by art’s power to widen the angle of vision, to produce “large pictures” where the human eye sees only isolated details, Henry longs not for the battle but for the singer’s tale of the battle, not for the ambiguous thrill of a closer look but for the vantage point of a Zeus on Olympus—or an editor in the copy room. For a while his mother’s protests stay him:
At last, however, he had made firm rebellion against this yellow light thrown upon the color of his ambitions. The newspapers, the gossip of the village, his own picturings, had aroused him to an uncheckable degree. They were in truth fighting finely down there. Almost every day the newspapers printed accounts of a decisive victory. (118)
Unaware that the yellow light is thrown by the press, not his mother, Henry remains blissfully oblivious to such obvious contradictions as daily reports of decisive victory. Rushing headlong into his dreams, Henry discovers that the view from the road is not quite what he had expected. More than the story of Henry’s slow and winding trip to courage, The Red Badge is a tale of weaning, not from the breast or the bottle but from the equally temporary support of triangular mediation. Like Collins in Crane’s short story, “A Mystery of Heroism,” Henry must enter a world where deeds more or less good are done by men more or less moral—no perfection, no heroes devoid of flaws, only uncertainty and compromise.
Whatever the original source of the protagonist’s desire, a rapid monetary return often takes the place of the tempter or mediator figure. Robinson Crusoe’s second voyage is undertaken haphazardly, without any final decision as to whether he should return home according to his parents’ wishes or set out to sea in order to make his fortune, yet the profit that he reaps convinces him more thoroughly than any third party that the life of the sea is for him. “This voyage made me both a sailor and a merchant,” he relates, “for I brought home 5 pounds 9 ounces of gold dust for my adventure, which yielded me in London at my return almost 300£, and this fill’d me with those aspiring thoughts which have since so compleated my ruin” (Defoe 1945:15). Much the same situation obtains in Marivaux’s Le Paysan parvenu, where Jacob receives monetary incentive to deploy his considerable masculine charms even before recognizing their existence. Like Eden’s serpent, Paris and its easy money soon corrupt the provincial peasant, defining his new morality rather than rewarding his natural honesty and openness, as he would have us believe.
A still more fascinating and unexpected use of money as catalyst informs the twelfth-century Spanish Poem of the Cid (Cantar de mio Cid). Don Rodrigo’s revolt against King Alfonso culminates in the Cid’s exile, connecting this text to the French medieval epic cycle known as the “cycle des barons révoltés.” From the very outset, however, it is not Rodrigo’s wounded honor that is stressed but his impoverished condition. On the one hand, he is characterized by his lack of money (“Gone is my gold and all my silver”); on the other, he systematically reduces his allies’ motivations to a monetary level (“Martín Antolínez, you are a hardy lance! / If I live, I will double your pay”; stanza 6). Some two hundred lines are devoted to the trick that the Cid plays on the Jews of Burgos in order to obtain enough money to begin his campaign. His prayers would seem more appropriate for Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography or a heavy laborer on the Alaska pipeline:
I pray to God our Father in heaven
that you who for me have left home and possessions,
before I die, may receive from me some gain;
that all you lose now twofold may be returned. (Poem 1963:18)
Whatever originally motivated Rodrigo’s actions, his continued progress is measured by a single parameter: profit. Just as Emma Bovary is lured farther and farther from the standards of Yonville-l’Abbaye, so the Cid pushes on, like some crusty forty-niner, following the call of demon gold. “Ah, knights, I must tell you the truth,” he says; “one would grow poor staying in one place always; / tomorrow in the morning let us move on” (54). Many similar pronouncements suggest that the Cid’s entire life force has been invested in his outsized love of money. Releasing his prisoner, the Count of Barcelona, Rodrigo stresses the immense booty that he and his men have taken from the field of battle: “I need it for my men, who share my pauperdom,” says the Cid, perhaps fooling the Count but certainly not the reader. “We keep alive by taking from you and from others,” admits Rodrigo (62). The sententia that sums up the Cid’s single-focus quest is found in no previous dual-focus epic, from The Iliad to The Song of Roland. Only a lord who has been exiled from national, categorical power would turn his attention so visibly to the twin processes of individuation and estate building; only a nouveau riche like Cid Ruy Díaz could subscribe to the dictum that “who serves a good lord lives always in luxury” (45).
The father figure, the tempter, the mediator, the quick profit—four categories of single-focus models to which we may now add a fifth and final class, the teacher. Dual-focus narrative has its judges, its sages, its interpreters of the law, but their word is final and incontrovertible, codified and specific, whereas the single-focus teacher deals in precepts and ambiguous sayings, simple indications that are neither final nor binding. Just as the serpent’s power derives from human desire (unlike the power of the dual-focus devil, who incarnates an independent source of evil), so the teacher (as opposed to the giver of the law) relies on the protagonist’s choices. The Old Testament stresses establishment of and respect for the law. The New Testament reserves a parallel place for the parable, the new form of Christ’s teachings. The Christian experiences Christ not as a giver of law but as a pointer, indicating an ambiguous path that is narrow and difficult but singularly lacking in specificity. To choose a line of conduct, the believer must read his own experience into the biblical text, whether he is Augustine hearing in the garden the famous words from Confessions VIII (“Tolle, legge”—“Take, read”), the late medieval mystic striving to understand the teachings of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, a fictitious cleric like Zola’s Father Mouret, or Gide’s diary-writing pastor.
Two texts that stand out for their literary figuration of pointing are also distinguished by their pictorial representation. By introducing the figure of the teacher as mediator between the protagonist and specific exempla of virtues or vices, John Climacus’s Climax (also called The Ladder of Perfection) and Dante’s Divina Commedia provide a fascinating single-focus alternative to the dual-focus approach used by Prudentius’s Psychomachia. Illustrations of Prudentius’s fourth-century text remain largely the same through the twelfth century: either Virtues and Vices appear as statically confronted warriors or the Virtue adopts a dominant position, with her foot on the corresponding Vice. Whatever the setup, the difference in characterization between the two warriors carries a clear message. The iconography of John’s Climax radically alters this system (J.R. Martin 1954). In Vatican cod. gr. 394, for example, each illustration presents three figures: the student (a monk poised to climb a rung higher on the Ladder of Virtue), the lesson (the Virtue or Vice to be adopted or shunned), and the teacher (the author, who stands between them, pointing out the Virtue or Vice to the monk). Whereas Psychomachia illustrations derive largely from Old Testament dual-focus types (e.g., David and Goliath) and Roman martial sculpture, Climax iconography reproduces the New Testament arrangement whereby Christ teaches his disciples by pointing to the daily life examples that surround them. In accordance with this model, both Virtues and Vices are portrayed as real men and women, the ambiguity of their identity underlining the importance of the student’s ability to see beyond their surface features.
The lesson thus loses its autonomy, no longer existing independently of the teacher and student. Furthermore, the elements are no longer related by metaphor (where Virtue and Vice represent parallel but diametrically opposed notions) but by metonymy, the pointing finger implying continuity through eye and mind as well. The switch from metaphor to metonymy is directly related to the lesson’s loss of autonomy, for it is the presence of the lesson in the student’s and teacher’s mind that assures the connection between the elements. In their mind—an essential concept, for the pointing relationship necessarily implies a thinking consciousness, absent from earlier Virtue/Vice representations. In the dual-focus system, whether portrayed in Psychomachia iconography, the Utrecht Psalter, or illustrations for the Old Testament, The Aeneid, or The Song of Roland, judgment takes place at a level beyond and above the text. The text’s constitutive duality can be resolved only by intervention of the gods or by their agent, the narrator. In Climax iconography, later psalters (including Vatican cod. gr. 1927, where David is constantly portrayed as pointing to exemplary wickedness), illustrations of The Divine Comedy (where Vergil and Beatrice are shown pointing out examples, not symbols, of Virtue and Vice), and in countless later single-focus texts, individuals do their own judging, constantly evaluating the moral or monetary value of ambiguous individuals or events. The text no longer depends on static confrontation of clearly marked opposite values, with measurement of the differences between values supplying textual meaning, but on the student’s perception and ability to understand and carry out the teacher’s precepts.
The text is not complete without some indication of the student’s reaction to the lesson. Climax iconography regularly portrays the monk’s successful learning in the form of a ladder, with the monk climbing one step in each episode. This alternation between lesson and learning, the two linked by a following-pattern emphasizing the monk-student, gives Climax iconography its distinctive single-focus character. The contents page reinforces this pattern, for in most Climax manuscripts the chapters are listed in order from the bottom to the top of the page, each chapter number and title inserted into one rung of the ladder that provides the page’s pictorial framework. Movement through the text thus corresponds to ascension of the ladder, the monk-student and the reader together progressing metonymically from ground level to the heavenly realm above.
The Odyssey first engages our sympathies for young Telemachus, before unveiling the fabulous adventures of his famous father. The overall effect of this technique is to subordinate, structurally, Odysseus’s activities to his son’s search. I call this process “bracketing,” where one person’s story is inserted into and subordinated to another’s. By mathematical convention, or in printed prose, bracketed material has a double status: it carries both its own independent meaning and a secondary signification. The same holds true throughout the history of single-focus narrative. One of the major markers separating the Renaissance story collection from the nascent novel is the importance accorded to listening. The included stories of La Princesse de Clèves may serve as separable tales, like the seventy-two entries in Marguerite de Navarre’s L’Heptaméron, but they also measure the reactions and illuminate the destiny of the protagonist who listens to them. What Madame de Lafayette accomplishes with oral narratives and listening, her eighteenth-century heirs achieve with written texts and reading. Packed with letters from one character to another, Pride and Prejudice reveals its eighteenth-century roots. No matter who has written them, no matter the recipient, Elizabeth is always present to read and evaluate the book’s many letters. Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth, though it reveals not only his feelings toward her but his personal history as well, is not sensed by the reader primarily as an account of Darcy’s life, but as evidence of Elizabeth’s mistaken evaluation of her future husband. Here, as elsewhere in the single-focus tradition, attention given to a secondary character broadens the story’s scope and deepens the reader’s interest yet in the text’s overall strategy serves only to bring the reader’s attention back once again to the protagonist.
In the cinema, several techniques have evolved to concentrate interest on a protagonist who must regularly give up the screen to other characters. Most of these techniques involve the use of the protagonist’s eyes or ears to subordinate one shot to another. When a character looks offscreen, the next image is conventionally accepted as the character’s view. It thus loses its independence and becomes bracketed within the character’s story. Dissolves introducing a dream sequence (or other imaginary scene) serve a like purpose. Even more common is the shot/reverse-shot sequence, in which one character is presented as viewed by another. This alternation between following the protagonist and following what the protagonist is following is part of a general single-focus tendency for protagonists to take on the role of secondary narrator.
The single-focus protagonist’s penchant for usurping the place of the author is especially evident when the protagonist takes responsibility for building the text’s events into a coherent story. In many ways, the subject matter of detective novels would seem to make them perfect candidates for dual-focus treatment. Often pitting a master criminal against a master detective, many detective novels thrive on a Manichaean worldview and its familiar black-and-white characters. Take Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, a Dick Tracy comic strip, or an early television crime show. Here justice is achieved by the action of an oh-so-moral and equally astute representative of law and order. We are squarely in the dual-focus world, alternately following good guys and bad guys, aware all along of which is which, of where the right lies and where the wrong. With the single-focus detective tale, from Poe on, no such assurance seems possible. The detective is not simply a representative of the law, designated to outwit or outfight his counterpart. He is also the only one with clear vision, able to separate the innocent from the guilty (a role formerly reserved for the dual-focus judge/narrator), and reconstitute the story that inculpates the one and exonerates the other. This reconstruction of the story carries an enormous weight in single-focus detective stories. From Dupin to Holmes and Maigret to Columbo, single-focus detective tales commonly end with a first-person narration in which the detective recapitulates his own process of thinking and thus the truth about the crime.
As the detective novel amply demonstrates, single-focus narrative is particularly attuned to the ordering of events and thus to the dimension of time. Just as dual-focus narrative uses the medium of space, measuring one two-dimensional area against another, single-focus narrative models time, basing its own linear structure on the irreversible, unidimensional nature of time. In the dual-focus universe, time is sensed only to be annulled. Years bring no changes but the ever-renewed cycle of the seasons. Centuries reveal no progress but the never-ending replacement of one generation by another. Clocks and calendars are invariably mentioned in dual-focus texts only in order to highlight the moment when the two foci will meet (e.g., the incessant clock inserts preceding D.W. Griffith’s last-minute rescues). When a single-focus character pulls out a clock or a calendar, however, an entirely different structure is engaged. For months, Emma Bovary keeps her private record of the time lapsed since her visit to the Vaubyessard ball. With each passing week, with each month of added distance from her sole contact with a real milieu corresponding to her romantic readings, Emma slips one step further toward the provincial despair that will eventually claim her life. Time represents the distance between two Emmas: a dreamlike past experience on one hand and daily reality on the other. Wherever time is evoked in single-focus narrative, it serves to measure the gap between two moments in a protagonist’s life, two states in a progression, two points on a line whose trajectory defines the text in question.
The time line that undergirds single-focus narratives is typically doubled by a physical embodiment that often takes the form of a journey (whether the literal wanderings of voyagers, the spiritual path of a Dante, or the psychological vagaries of the Bildungsroman). In order to turn the undifferentiated flow of time into a system capable of producing meaning, single-focus narrative resorts to a wide variety of techniques designed to pair moments whose significance surfaces only in their comparison. The most characteristic involves the use of a “moral mirror”: the protagonist’s memory triggered by an event in the present, he/she recalls a corresponding moment in the past, then compares the two. On the verge of leaving the Pension Vauquer to share a sumptuous apartment with his mistress, Rastignac consults his moral mirror: “He found that he looked so different from the Rastignac who had come to Paris the year before that, observing himself by an effect of moral optics, he wondered at that moment whether he really looked like himself” (Balzac 1965b:288). In these few lines we learn worlds about the way in which single-focus characters are conceived. Without the dimension of time, Rastignac is nothing, for his fundamental characteristic is the ability to change, to become a different character. However much he may utter the expression “himself,” we know that there is no such fixed category, for the novel is constructed precisely to show the development of one self into another, to reveal the nonexistence of the unchanging base that dual-focus texts take for granted.
It is instructive to compare this typically single-focus use of the mirror—as if Narcissus always saw his former self when he gazed in the water—with the characteristic dual-focus mirror. In Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, the fountain in the middle of the forest has magic properties. Instead of reflecting the person looking into the fountain, the mirror reveals that person’s true love, both ideal complement and perfect partner. The pastoral practice of amoebic verse embodies the dual-focus mirror in literary form. Each male verse is mirrored by a female verse, with changes in only those aspects that male/female difference requires. This flaw in the mirror—the matching of a male verse to its female counterpart—recapitulates the sexual difference on which the text’s duality is based. A similar effect rules over dual-focus epic, where formulaic verses (such as those that stress the similarities between Charlemagne and Baligant only to highlight their differences) and symmetrical images (as in the shootout showdown of a Hollywood western) capitalize on the similarity between foes to better isolate and play up the differences between them.
Perhaps the most common mirroring device in single-focus narrative involves the use of a recurrent place or motif to serve a measuring function, drawing attention to the physical, moral, or psychological distance traveled since the last similar scene. In Chrétien’s Yvain, for example, the magic fountain is visited by the title character four times. Each visit stands out as a milepost in Yvain’s career, offering an opportunity to measure his development since the previous visit. When Yvain first comes to the fountain, he is only acting out a scenario, imitating his cousin Calogrenant. Shortly afterward, he returns, this time to defend the woman with whom he has fallen in love. The third visit shows definite progress, for it represents the first time since his madness that Yvain has remembered his wife and his marriage responsibilities. Not until his last visit to the fountain does he show any initiative, forcing Laudine to take him back by using the fountain’s marvelous powers to create a perpetual storm in her kingdom. The comparisons facilitated by the fountain thus demonstrate how Yvain’s youthful boldness has been turned into mature responsibility.
Another common method of measuring the protagonist’s change (especially in the nineteenth-century realist novel) is the cumulative metaphor. In Balzac’s Grandeur et décadence de César Birotteau, the merchant’s acceptance of the Cross of the Legion of Honor is treated as a veritable crucifixion. Tracing the perfumer’s trajectory from ambition to apotheosis, from bankruptcy to death, this extended developmental metaphor provides a framework for the protagonist’s progress, at the same time constantly suggesting the probable outcome of the affair. The cumulative nature of the metaphor has the function of further concentrating interest on the central character. When the magistrates who restore Birotteau’s right to do business are likened to the angels who rolled the stone away, this figure functions less as a description of the magistrates than as commentary on Birotteau’s situation. Each new extension of the figure sends us back to the central character.
In Le Père Goriot, Rastignac is the active component of two extended metaphors: one regarding a young man’s need to acquire a carriage in order to keep from being spattered by mud; the other likening Rastignac to Telemachus in search of his famous father. The moral and physical overtones of these figures dominate the novel’s imagery, focusing attention on the protagonist even when it is women who are termed “post-horses” or when Goriot and Vautrin are compared with Scylla and Charibdis. Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé Mouret lays enormous emphasis on a developmental metaphor likening Mouret to Adam, for, like Adam, Mouret will be expelled from a paradise of fresh fruit and free love. In L’Assommoir, Zola makes much of the objects surrounding Gervaise. Too simple to understand or express the changes taking place in her own life, Gervaise dwells in an atmosphere charged with meaning. The gutter in the Rue de la Goutte d’Or, for example, changes color to match the laundress’s fate. So sensitive does the reader become to Zola’s use of Gervaise’s surroundings to reflect her past and predict her future that it becomes increasingly difficult to read a description of objects, buildings, or characters without seeing it as a commentary on Gervaise’s life. Wherever we turn, the created world returns us to the protagonist. How surprising to find in one of the key texts of naturalism one of the basic tenets of romanticism, for what is Zola’s technique if not an extension of the pathetic fallacy, the system that reads the natural world as an expression of the character’s feelings?
It is instructive to compare pathetic fallacy—along with other extended metaphors built around the protagonist’s development—with epic simile. As all readers of The Odyssey will remember, the dawn is “rosy-fingered” and Odysseus is “much-enduring.” In keeping with dual-focus tradition, each object and character is defined by a fundamental, inalterable attribute. If Aeneas is “long-suffering,” it is not because of some transitory condition but because of the patient courage that constitutes his very character. Epic similes immobilize a character. Far from evoking developmental capacities, they suggest that the gods created these people and objects once and for all, in this particular way and in no other, whereas pathetic fallacy and extended metaphor offer opportunities to measure changes in the protagonist’s situation.
The developmental tendency of the single-focus mode appears most clearly through altered repetition. With moral mirrors, repeated scenes, reiterated locations, or developmental metaphors, the general strategy is the same: a subsequent moment, through formal similarity and/or thematic echoes, recalls an earlier moment, the difference between the two constituting the transformation that gives single-focus narrative its reason for being and its basic meaning. By combining elements of similarity (which attract attention and induce comparison) with elements of difference (which permit the reader to discover change and thus meaning), altered repetition provides both the rhetorical and structural building blocks of single-focus narrative.
Considered from a distance, all single-focus texts look alike. A character leaves familiar shores and accepted mores out of a desire for higher values, thereby attracting the narrator’s and reader’s attention. Faced in the course of time with numerous choices, the protagonist creates himself or herself anew. Here and there throughout the text, echoes of past experiences recall to the reader (and often to the protagonist as well) the distance covered by the protagonist. Single-focus texts are built around retrospective moments which, by their ability to measure change, lend meaning to the text (and the life of the protagonist). Laid out along a time line, these clear representations of present, past, and the distance separating the two provide a strong framework to which the other aspects of single-focus narrative are easily attached.
If single-focus meaning is based on the difference between paired moments in the life of the protagonist, single-focus presentational strategy regularly depends on another kind of pairing. Where dual-focus narrative thrives on parallel presentation of similar events, single-focus texts systematically follow an event with its interpretation. Pride and Prejudice, for example, slowly works into a regular alternation between group scenes and Elizabeth’s reaction to their content. Dialogue permits Austen to cover a broad range of topics apropos of a large group of characters; internal views of Elizabeth’s reactions facilitate identification while providing continuity between seemingly unrelated scenes. Evaluating each conversation with Elizabeth, readers increasingly regard each new statement from her point of view, thereby broadening the range of reader experiences without compromising the sense that Elizabeth is indeed the novel’s central character.
It is interesting to compare this typically nineteenth-century technique of alternation between scene and summary, narrator and character, with the technique of a similar author writing under the effect of a strong theatrical influence. Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves is heavily marked by the techniques of classical theater, especially by the practices of her contemporary Jean Racine, well known for his alternation between scenes confronting major characters and scenes restricted to a single major character alone or in private discussion with a confidant(e). True to the practice of her period, which reserves dialogue for the theater and dedicates the novel to impersonal narration, Madame de Lafayette eschews direct reporting of dialogue, preferring to alternate between a public scene showing Madame de Clèves in action and a private scene entirely devoted to her heroine’s evaluation of the preceding public event.
This constant alternation between event and interpretation, action and contemplation, is wholeheartedly adopted by the eighteenth-century novel, which rapidly makes the necessary accommodations to first-person narration. The memoir novel characteristically alternates between an adventure story that might as well be narrated in the third person and the protagonist’s evaluation of the adventures recalled. The epistolary novel microminiaturizes this alternation, often combining in a single letter the narration of events with commentary appropriate to the recipient of the letter in question. Indeed, the “squeezing” of both event and interpretation into a single scene or sentence is an increasingly frequent occurrence in the history of single-focus narrative. Madame de Lafayette’s Zaïde regularly constructs sentences melding the protagonist’s reactions to the unknown woman of his dreams with the facts that he has been able to glean about her. Readers are constantly called on to split sentences in two, separating Consalve’s objective observations from his subjective conclusions. In the following representative passage I have italicized Consalve’s reactions and interpretations:
He was surprised to find such symmetrical features and such a delicate face; he stared with astonishment at the beauty of her mouth and the whiteness of her neck; indeed, he was so charmed by this beautiful foreigner that he was nearly convinced she was not a mortal. (de Lafayette 1961b:43)
This interweaving of reporting and reaction grows along with the novel to the point where the latter half of the nineteenth century gives over much of its narrative energy to devising methods for further merging the language of events with that of interpretation. Free indirect style, as perfected by Flaubert and Zola, makes it possible to combine both concerns in the same words, thus assuring a permanent bond between event and interpretation. What the French perfected as a stylistic trait becomes for Henry James a veritable principle of narrative construction, with each bit of information filtered through the eyes and mind of an idiosyncratic protagonist.
At the root of this tradition lies a fundamental single-focus attitude toward language. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug,” a parchment provides the directions for finding a buried treasure. Before becoming a treasure map, however, this parchment had first revealed only a senseless sequence of letters and a death’s head. Indeed, before the cryptogram appeared, the parchment had been taken by Legrand to be no more than a dirty blank sheet. For there to be a story here, for a treasure to appear out of the ground, a very basic change has to come about in Legrand’s attitude toward the parchment. At first the parchment is only an appropriate place to sketch the scarabeus that Legrand has found. So far there is no story. Only when Legrand’s visitor suggests that the scarabeus looks like a death’s head does Legrand begin to change his attitude toward the parchment. Once he recognizes that the dirty sheet before him is capable of signifying, Legrand becomes like an insane man, sealing himself off from the outside world and following clue after clue like Holmes on the moor. His discovery that the parchment is not just a fact of nature but conceals an authored message, a message possibly written by Captain Kidd, unlocks a new world of meaning for Legrand. Before, the parchment was taken simply to exist; now, it is understood to signify. Every mark on the parchment becomes a potential sign, every sign a potential message, every message a potential treasure. On this assumption the story hinges.
All single-focus texts operate in roughly the same fashion. Only when the facts of the world are clearly taken to be artifacts does the world open itself to single-focus meaning. In his little book on Robinson Crusoe, Hugh Kenner (1968) makes much of Robinson’s change in attitude once he has seen a footprint on “his” island. Before this moment the shipwrecked sailor had asked no questions of the many things he found on the island. Things are just there; they are part of the landscape. Created by God, they excite no suspicion regarding their authorship. Once Robinson sees the imprint of a human foot, however, every rock, every tree, every animal becomes a potential sign of human presence. Utterly transformed, things that once were just things, referring only to themselves, now become signs, always pointing to an author and thus to potential danger. The things themselves, of course, have not changed in the process. The sea is still the sea, but now it is constantly scanned for evidence of a hostile invasion. The sand remains unchanged, but for Robinson it has now become a potential bearer of evidence that men have passed this way. Even Robinson’s musket shots and cooking fires change meaning, for they now risk exposing Robinson to his potential enemies. From constant concern with survival and daily organization, the narrative turns to Robinson’s preparation for a future confrontation with the savages of whom he has seen repeated evidence.
Before he saw the human footprint, Robinson took all things to be facts. From that point on, things become signs of authorship, or artifacts. Facts point only to their own existence, artifacts always imply the logical progression that led to their existence. Facts are simply there: they carry no message, they call for no interpretation. Artifacts, in contrast, can always be made to divulge a meaning, a hidden signification. But they must be interpreted in order to come to life. The quintessential single-focus attitude toward the world is an artifactual one, a sense that things are not as they seem, that meaning lies beneath the surface, that only active interpretation can reveal the truth about things. Single-focus protagonists thus make a full-time job out of the simple process of reinterpreting the world before them. In fact, it is the specificity of a personal interpretation that lends each single-focus character individuality and thus the right to regulate the narrative. Reading the artifacts is what single-focus narrative is all about. It is thus hardly surprising that two of the most important and representative single-focus genres should be built around characters whose sole concern is to read the artifacts.
“Murder mysteries,” Pauline Kael is reported to have said, “are apt to end with a confession.” Indeed, we might say that the confession and the detective story are part and parcel of the same artifactual text. Whether it is the detective or the criminal who tells the story, the progression and the effect are the same: once the facts are laid out, they are turned into artifacts by the one person who knows how to interpret them, and finally the true story is revealed. Thus all confessions, like all detective novels, tell the same story twice—once to lay out the facts, and a second time to lay bare their meaning. How this process works in the tale of confession is made strikingly clear by the text that lies at the root of all other confessional tales, Augustine’s Confessions.
If many single-focus texts represent what R.W.B. Lewis calls “denitiation” (1978:346), the separation of the individual from a preestablished norm or group, Augustine constructs his story in the form of a double denitiation, the garden conversion of chapter eight balancing the pear stealing of chapter two. In order to place himself above God—like Adam—Augustine wantonly disregards the law by stealing pears. This departure from the straight and narrow is matched by the later garden experience that calls Augustine away from the dissolute life into which he had fallen. “Tolle, legge,” a voice says—take this and read. Opening the Bible, Augustine finds a new path available to him, the path leading to his decision to record these confessions. By progressing through perversion to conversion, Augustine changes the meaning of his religion. Instead of remaining subservient to his Creator, Augustine places himself in a situation where he can now recognize his sin, thus not only glorifying God but at the same time establishing his own individuality.
The confession itself constitutes the spiritual exercise called for by the conversion. Recognition of sin creates a new desire—this time for God—causing the Christian to desire purgation, a radical emptying of past failings out of the body’s vessel. Like the detective novel, the confession records both the commission of the crime and its undoing, for to admit the perversion is to accomplish the conversion. Here, as throughout the single-focus tradition, meaning derives from interpretation rather than action alone. Augustine’s text transmutes actions into words, just as the detective counteracts the crime by reconstructing the fable, turning action into story. Again we see the immense importance of point-of-view concerns to single-focus narrative, for the action of perversion (as its etymology implies) involves turning away from God, but the confession of perversion signifies conversion—turning back toward God. This shift moves us from the realm of fact into artifact. Words not only designate events but also point simultaneously to a motivation for describing those events.
If his Confessions recount the story of Augustine’s life, they are also the account of his attempt to come to terms with the nature of evil. Constantly seeking to explain evil differently from the archetypically dual-focus system of the Manichaeans, Augustine finally finds a solution in the perversion/ conversion format underlying his confessions. The problem, succinctly stated, is this. Experience teaches us that there is evil in the world, yet the Bible and the church tell us that God is good, so God cannot be held responsible for the existence of evil. Nevertheless, evil exists. The Manichaeans explain this situation by positing an evil principle—separate from and opposed to God—responsible for the presence of evil in the world. As a Christian, Augustine refuses this solution, because it denies God’s omnipotence. Where, then, does evil come from? Augustine confects a strikingly single-focus alternative to the Manichaeans’ dual-focus approach. Humans may be made in God’s image, Augustine recognizes, but they are free to act according to their own desires. It is in this freedom that Augustine discovers the source of evil. Refusing the static dual-focus approach, Augustine redistributes value along a linear path, defining evil not as an essence but as a direction: to move away from God is evil, to come closer to God is good. Man is thus solely responsible for the presence of evil in the world, through a tendency to turn away from God. We now see the importance of Augustine’s story of his own perversion, for it is only through his wicked itinerary that Augustine eventually discovers the importance of turning back toward God (thereby respecting the etymology of the term “conversion”).
The Manichaean solution involves confrontation of two mutually exclusive spaces. This configuration provides no room for individual human beings, whereas Augustine makes the penitent sinner the source of both evil and good. God remains the source of all life, but evil and good appear as a function of the individual’s itinerary. When humans move away from God (perversion), they create evil, but when they move back toward God (conversion), they produce good. Like the innumerable confessional texts that they inspired, Augustine’s Confessions infuse the story of perversion with the spirit of the conversion, thus making a change in attitude rather than a change of activity responsible for transmutation of evil into good. For Augustine, all men and women begin with God, thus producing a memory of previous happiness sufficient to inspire a subsequent desire for God—and thus a reinterpretation of previous perversion.
Augustine’s artifactual reading of his own past, recognizing a motley array of actions and thoughts as evidence of the sinner’s search for God, is matched by the artifactual reading of the detective, who demonstrates the systematic nature of the case’s givens, thus preparing the thief ’s confession, ready to be signed at the end of the story. In Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” Dupin interprets the room where the letter is hidden, making it come alive with authorship, inducing it to speak with the voice of the minister who carried off the letter. To the bumbling police inspector, the note pad by the phone reveals nothing but empty sheets. Sprinkling a substance on the pad, the detective magically produces an impression, the trace of a conversation. Prowess at artifactual reading is repeatedly emphasized by juxtaposing the detective’s version with another, pedestrian, attempt. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Case of Identity,” Holmes asks Watson for a description of the woman who has just presented her case. Though competent and accurate, Watson’s description is neutral and declarative, never deductive and artifactual like the one Holmes later provides. Throughout Doyle’s fiction this technique holds: Holmes’s explanations always stand out in contrast to the uninspired versions that they supplant (commonly those of the client, Watson, or some police supernumerary). Poe works in a similar manner, using an uncomprehending foil for the extraordinary deductive capacities of Dupin or Legrand. In more recent private detective tales, the official police commonly play the role of inadequate interpreters.
The need for a mistaken, incomplete, or simply uninterpreted version of the story—for which the detective will provide the proper reading—regularly leads the detective novel to present two complete versions of the events surrounding the murder. Or perhaps I should say that a first version relates the events surrounding the murder (an array of facts, lacking order), while a second version relates the events leading up to the murder (a reasoned, linear, account). John Guillermin’s 1978 film version of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile presents two full series of images, each purporting to relate the events of the crime. The first represents an objective view of the facts but fails to connect them in a meaningful manner. When juxtaposed with Hercule Poirot’s artifactual reading, however, the first version suddenly appears unenlightened rather than objective. The detective’s voiceover in the second version reveals the clever deductions that lend brio and truth to his interpretation.
Like his fellow detectives, Poirot is something of an eccentric. From Dupin and Holmes to Rockford and Columbo by way of Spade and Marlowe, detectives are marked by a slightly antisocial and even vaguely suspicious nature. Indeed, if detectives are often confused with criminals, it is because their behavior is every bit as idiosyncratic as the criminals’ conduct. It is this secret harmony between the detective and the criminal mind that makes it possible for detectives to complete their investigations successfully. The police regularly fail to discover the criminal because their law-and-order methods simply do not correspond with the lawless logic of the outlaw. Detectives can easily put themselves in the skin of a criminal, because they think like a murderer. According to the genre’s first master detective, Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, the detective’s success depends on his ability to achieve “thorough identification” with his opponent (“The Purloined Letter”; 1981c:463). “The analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent,” says Poe, or he loses all chance of victory (“Murders in the Rue Morgue”; 1981b:379).
Here we see just how radically the single-focus detective tale differs from its cousin the cops-and-robbers story. Based on confrontation between two similarly organized teams, each vying for supremacy in a limited arena, the cops-and-robbers story commonly develops along familiar dual-focus lines, with regular alternation between the two groups and with a hero distinguished by righteousness rather than an ability to identify with the enemy. The dual-focus version of criminal justice has flourished in the popular media. Comic strips have devised one supercop after another, from the archetypal Dick Tracy and Superman to Batman, the Avenger, and many another protector of the law. Television as well has by and large eschewed the single-focus approach to crime detection, preferring the more physical and clearcut dual-focus approach. It takes a Peter Falk (Columbo) or a James Garner (Rockford) to make something attractive out of the single-focus detective’s mental prowess, while the chases and shootouts of the dual-focus version depend far less on versatile acting. In truth, the single-focus detective story need not even have a criminal present, for the only criminal who counts is the one created by the mind of the detective as he gives order to a series of seemingly unconnected events. In a sense, the detective must always play the murderer’s role as well as his own.
“I will now play Oedipus to the Rattleborough enigma,” begins the narrator of Poe’s “Thou Art the Man” (1981d:471)—Oedipus, the master detective, he who solved the riddle, he who protected his society from the Sphinx, simultaneously bringing shame and destruction on the community. So thorough is the detective’s identification with the lawless opponent that behind every detective story there lurks the vague sense that the detective is only solving his own crimes, that the detective is so good at identifying with the criminal because he is that criminal. Like a good detective, Oedipus reads the evidence, following every clue until he has eventually fully composed a confession—his own. The poetic justice of the affair can be seized only when we realize that Oedipus’s self-blinding echoes Adam and Eve’s desire to have their eyes opened, to see with the eyes of a god. The two great single-focus myths thus complete each other, for Oedipus the detective always wants to know too much, always seeks to know that which it is unhealthy to know. This is why the detective is never a normal member of the regular police—from Dupin to Holmes, from Spade to Serpico, the detective always represents pride, the desire to know more, to surpass normal human (i.e., police) force. The detective’s overweaning pride (he is always sure of his ability to surpass the police) must therefore be punished. Oedipus paid for his own pride and desire; more recent detectives simply transfer the confession to the captured criminal, the detective and the criminal being the only characters to believe the same version of the crime.
Tales told twice—such is the content of single-focus texts. The official version of the facts is rewritten by the detective. The adventure version of the story is reinterpreted as sin by the confessor. The Bildungsroman hero is forever looking back and recalling the past as the present rewrites that past through a series of altered repetitions. Ironic nineteenth-century novels pair the protagonist’s limited view with the insights of an infinitely more perceptive narrator. The mechanisms driving this system are nowhere more visible than in the psychological novel. As Jean Rousset has pointed out, de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves forever alternates between action and contemplation, between a scene in society and a private scene involving self-analysis (1964:21). Under the influence of imitators like Richardson, this rhythm provided a prototype for centuries of psychological novels. Building a new model for literary characters around public/private and outer/inner dichotomies, de Lafayette at the same time consecrates a new method of reiterating the same story. When Madame de Clèves falls in love with the Duc de Nemours, her public conduct changes radically, so much so that her solitary moments are consistently devoted to analysis of her public actions. After each new encounter, Madame de Clèves scurries back to her apartment—to her mind—to consider the meaning of her actions. The mechanism underlying the system may best be understood in the following manner:
Before she has heard her mother’s stories of court intrigue, before she has herself fallen in love, Madame de Clèves takes every event at face value. After her fall, however, she sees every action (including her own) as an artifact, a sign to be interpreted, a mark of her own motivations. Like Adam, whose fall turned a world where bodies and meanings are never veiled into a new world of signs and sham, Madame de Clèves remains haunted by the fear that others will discover what she has found in the mirror of her own actions. Of course, her worry comes too late, for the reader—that arch-decoder—has long read her actions and discovered her secrets.
Besides its evident connections to the artifactual reading strategy of the confessional tale and the detective story, the encoding/decoding process recalls the narcissistic, oedipal context of single-focus narrative as a whole. Consider Elizabeth, upon receiving Darcy’s self-justifying letter at the midpoint of Pride and Prejudice. Her reactions lead to a total reevaluation of the events of the first half of the novel. In the space of a couple of pages we review Wickham’s claims, Jane’s enamourment, and Bingley’s departure, not to mention Elizabeth’s condemnation of Darcy, whom she now finds fully justified. Yet the emphasis is not on the apparent change in Darcy, the object of her musings, but on the clear change that she senses in herself, as subject of her evaluations. After a period of careful comparison of her current opinions to her past conclusions, Elizabeth returns to her own situation and to the psychological state that led to her conclusions. Darcy and Wickham become mirrors for her own position, markers of her own faults:
She grew absolutely ashamed of herself.—Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.
“How despicably have I acted!” she cried.—“I, who have prided myself on my discernment!—I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.—How humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!—Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.—Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.” (Austen 1966:143–44)
Like Madame de Clèves, Elizabeth is constantly brought back to herself by consideration of others. The secondary characters of single-focus narrative—model, tempter, teacher—mirror and reveal the central character. With Pride and Prejudice, we discover that any event, however unrelated to the protagonist it may seem, can be made to bring the heroine back to herself.
The characteristic single-focus method of producing meaning involves paired segments related by altered repetition and located along a linear, chronological sequence. Single-focus authors are thus confronted by the ever-present danger that significant connections between events will be masked by the considerable temporal and textual distance separating them. Many single-focus texts therefore deploy techniques specifically designed to bring together in textual space events that are quite distant in terms of diegetic time. In the confessional tale the (sinful) past and (penitent) present are perpetually juxtaposed through a judicious combination of action and narration. Stories of past events are thus separated from current reactions by no more than a few words. The detective novel similarly intertwines the crime story (featuring the criminal as actor) with the solution story (starring the detective as narrator). Psychological novels use a remembered past and projected future to maintain a double temporal framework. Secondary characters figure a hypothetical future, investing the present with future possibilities, just as the past constantly wells up within the present, giving it depth and meaning. More than just a chronological, linear tale, marked by temporally separated altered repetitions, single-focus narrative also labors mightily to invest single moments with the depth of multiple time frames.
Within the single-focus tradition the process of reading occupies a position of special importance. Detectives read the world for clues, penitent Christians read their own past for signs of sin, young ladies in love read their behavior in order to discover the state of their affections. Dual-focus narrative makes of the book—and by extension the world—a sacred object, open for all to see, from generation to generation the same, but the single-focus system predicates the protagonist’s individuality on prowess at reading the world. From a public activity where the god-given, factual nature of the world is taken for granted, reading becomes a private process where every phenomenon, taken as artifact, can be made to divulge the conditions and motivation of its creation. But what of the reader of single-focus texts? How is this external reader positioned with respect to the reading process within the text?
The role of storytelling within single-focus narrative provides a convenient introduction to the process of single-focus reading. Consider the typical medieval narrative image sequence recounting the life of a saint. Common for centuries, these sequences are found on reliquaries and many other sacred objects. Typically, all but one of the scenes relate the saint’s life and miracles. The final scene, however, differs significantly, for it reveals not the saint’s life as such but a text—in the form of relics, a shrine, or a pictorial sequence—made from and recalling that life. This pattern holds sway throughout the single-focus tradition: a series of events leads, in a final moment, to their sedimentation as text, a recollection of the actions and thoughts of the protagonist, and thus a monument consecrating and recalling the protagonist’s individuality. What the saint’s life accomplishes with a relic and an admiring public converted by the saint’s example, the romance handles through an account of adventure offered to the court or the knights gathered around the Round Table. When Chrétien’s Erec (Érec et Énide) returns, victorious, from the Joie de la Cour adventure, he celebrates his victory over uxoriousness by telling his tale, thus reorienting the court around his own story. Instead of deriving his renown from the Round Table, Erec reverses the relationship, now covering Arthur’s court with the glory represented by the account of his own success. The final moment in a complete adventure is not, as Joseph Campbell (1956) would have it, the return of the triumphant hero but the telling of his story. For the successful completion of an adventure confers on the protagonist the right to authorship.
Even with the least Promethean of protagonists, the ability to generate a story marks elevation to a higher sphere. When the blind man’s beggar boy Lazarillo finally reaches the stage where he is able to compose a preface filled with literary references, when he can recount with humor the various stages of his eventful life, it is quite clear that he has reached a new plateau, that of the lettered man. In a period marked by the popularity of story collections, it is only with texts like Lazarillo de Tormes, where included stories or first-person accounts become specifically tied to the destiny of the protagonist, that the novel (and with it single-focus narration) firmly takes hold. As long as included stories are not clearly justified as narrated by characters who have won the right to recount their own stories, then we remain in the late Renaissance “country inn” subgenre, no doubt an important ancestor of the novel, but still too diffuse and unintegrated to take full advantage of the single-focus system. Numerous early texts bend the included story to single-focus ends. In Madame de Lafayette’s Zaïde, for example, the protagonist Consalve spends a major portion of the novel soliciting stories regarding the origins of his beloved Zaïde and the man pictured in the portrait she reveres, only to find out in the final story that the man pictured is himself. As the circle is completed, we discover that Consalve has for two hundred pages been in search of himself and that his search has resulted in this surprisingly modern novel, published in 1670. Throughout the eighteenth century, preference for first-person narration—as memoirs, diaries, or letters—simplifies the process of tying the story’s narration to its narrated material. The need to justify narration of one’s memoirs becomes a major thematic motif, generating preface after preface dedicated to the single-focus practice of transmuting character into author.
With the nineteenth century, Promethean longings are transferred to the personality or profession of the protagonist. For many a Romantic hero or heroine, the ultimate consecration is to turn their thoughts or feelings into stories. The realist novel offers characters whose inquisitive nature makes them capable, like Rastignac, of collecting the material necessary for elaborating a story—a race of characters that evolves quite naturally into the detective. Flaubert inaugurates a new period in the development of single-focus storytelling. With characters diminishing in intelligence as the century wears on, producing lower lights like Emma Bovary and Gervaise Macquart, the probability of Romantic overreaching lessens accordingly, yet Emma and Gervaise hardly lack ambition to create their own stories. In this context, free indirect style proves astonishingly effective, allowing Flaubert and Zola to assign much of the narration to their heroines, without abandoning realistic presentation. The point-of-view experiments often identified with Henry James (but in fact far more widely practiced) represent the zenith of the single-focus tendency to transfer narrational duties to the character who has merited the position of protagonist.
Corresponding with the single-focus protagonist’s tendency to become a teller of tales is the frequency with which single-focus protagonists derive individuality from their interpretation of others’ stories. Perhaps the simplest version of this procedure is the initial tale inspiring the young protagonist to enter the world in a particular way. Brendan yearns to experience the marvels recounted by Barinthus; Yvain dreams of holding the court’s attention as Calogrenant does while telling his story; Henry Fleming longs to imitate the heroism reported by his local newspaper. Often, the protagonist gains inspiration from another text: the Bible in Augustine’s Confessions and many a lesser pious text; chivalric romances in Don Quixote; or even the protagonist’s own writings, as in Gide’s La Symphonie pastorale.
Symbolic of all such attempts, in terms of method as well as content, is Poe’s landmark story, “The Gold Bug,” where a cryptogram is made to divulge a tale of buried treasure. So it is throughout the single-focus tradition: apparently unrelated facts are transformed by the protagonist into a map of hidden treasure—the protagonist’s personality. In the wake of Poe’s stories of mystery and intrigue come not only a spate of cryptogram stories but also the entire genre of detective fiction, devoted from the start to glorifying the process of reading: reading secret documents, reading faces, reading evidence, reading the world. Methodologically speaking, we find surprising models for the reading process championed by the detective novel: on the one hand, the self-analysis of the psychological novel (Madame de Clèves or Elizabeth Bennet analyzing their own actions in order to discover the state of their emotions); on the other, the careful letter-reading that characterizes epistolary novels from Gabriel de Guilleragues’s Les Lettres portugaises to Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses.
The type of reading that characterizes single-focus internal readers offers important clues about the role reserved for external readers. The Gospels provide a particularly apt example. Among the teachings of Jesus, none is more pervasive and characteristic than his insistence on individual participation in the process of deciding what is right. Eschewing the Old Testament tendency to promulgate a large number of very specific laws, Jesus speaks instead in parables, microminiaturized stories that imply rather than state, always leaving to the reader the freedom and responsibility for interpretation. Defining his followers from the start as readers and interpreters (a process furthered by reformers throughout the history of the church), Jesus constantly insists on the reader’s participatory status. More than simply absorbing the text, the reader must attempt to understand it, must come to decisions regarding it, must comment on it. In short, as Matthew 15:10 clearly states, “not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth.” Dietary laws and other legal restrictions must be replaced by personal convictions. This new system is reinforced by Jesus’ insistence on the importance of virtues and sins that remain invisible to the casual observer, for they are not to be found in tangible actions.
In response to the Old Testament’s restrictive Commandments, Jesus offers the Beatitudes, stressing qualities of the spirit rather than prohibitions of the flesh. Where the Old Testament prohibits murder, Jesus warns against anger (Matthew 5:21–22). Where the seventh Commandment outlaws the act of adultery, Jesus stresses the mental state of lust (Matthew 5:27–28). His systematic reinterpretation of Jewish law lays enormous weight on intent, on emotion, on spiritual concerns—in short, on aspects of life that are hidden from the outsider. No longer justified by adherence to a fixed set of legal codes, individuals must be judged according to their inner lives. No one, not even we ourselves, can judge our value on the basis of externals. In coming to terms with our own actions and thoughts, we thus remain as much outsiders to ourselves as we do to others. Only by reading and interpreting our actions and thoughts can we discover our true intentions, our true values. A new myth of personality is thus born. The model of personal organization fostered by Jesus and his teachings includes an observer as well as an actor—someone to judge actions and thoughts as well as someone to perpetrate them.
The system popularized by Christianity pervades single-focus narrative. Stressing internal states, this system constantly asks individuals to discern, among the data collected by their senses, patterns implying a particular kind of meaning. Whereas the dual-focus Ephesian Tale (Xenophon) simply states that Habrocomes loves Anthia, Madame de Clèves must repeatedly analyze in private her previous public behavior in order to find out what she thinks and feels. The Scarlet Letter constitutes, from beginning to end, an elegant demonstration of the inadequacy of public judgment to the question of personal destiny. Gide’s novelette trilogy—L’Immoraliste, La Porte étroite, La Symphonie pastorale—repeatedly demonstrates the difficulties of knowing a human being, even when that being is oneself. The process of analysis is necessary, for without it the narrative cannot reach the level at which the single-focus system locates knowledge and value.
A special weight is thus put on the process of reading, for internal and external readers alike. Single-focus reading is not a direct mode of knowledge, where one individual absorbs another’s truths, but a creative process wherein raw words and brute facts are transformed into meaningful patterns or justified evaluations. Patterns and values are not located on the same level as facts and words, so the reader’s intervention is needed to assure passage from one level to another. Each evaluation, each interpretation, is thus invested with a particular reader’s personality. Every time we read and interpret we are constituting ourselves. Augustine discovers and expresses his religion by reading his own past. The personalities of Marivaux’s Marianne and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa are created by and through their interpretation of the society around them. Gervaise Macquart is indistinguishable from her (mis)understanding of those whom she daily encounters. As single-focus readers, we are constantly thrust into a position where we cannot avoid expressing—indeed, creating—our personality through the conclusions we reach about the text’s raw words and brute facts. Regularly faced with ambiguous characters and unreliable narrators, as well as undefined mixes of character and narrator responsibility for specific remarks, single-focus readers find themselves unable to read in the transparent manner appropriate to the dual-focus text. We have to work at making the facts speak, even if, like Doyle’s Watson, we are ultimately embarrassed by our paltry results. The text calls us to read, offers examples of how to read, then frees us to invest our reading with our own particular personalities.
Single-focus texts belong to protagonists who remain on the margins of accepted practice or law. By stepping beyond traditional limits, single-focus protagonists attain the exceptional status that makes them fit objects of interest for author, narrator, and reader alike. The tenth chapter of Bede’s Life of Saint Cuthbert provides an elegant demonstration of the mind-set necessary for collecting tales of the exceptional. While visiting Coldingham, Cuthbert leaves his bed in the dead of night. Now this is not common behavior, so it arouses the curiosity of one of the young monks, who follows Cuthbert down to the sea. There he witnesses a quite unexpected scene: after standing for hours in the deep water, praying constantly, Cuthbert is dried off and warmed up by otters. The young monk, expecting something of a more scurrilous nature, confesses his presumption and promises not to reveal the purpose of the saint’s nightly vigils. Eventually, however, he must have told his story, for otherwise it would not have reached Bede, whose avidity for exceptional events has made it possible to compile an account of Cuthbert’s life.
This simple tale presents a powerful figure for the composition and reading of single-focus narrative. Many other events no doubt took place on that same night in Coldingham, but we hear of none of those, for none was sufficiently abnormal to warrant narration. Cuthbert’s actions, on the other hand, are in every way unusual and thus arouse the eventual narrator’s curiosity, without which Cuthbert’s affair with the otters would never have been known. The paradox in this tale lies in the fact that the young monk, curious about Cuthbert’s exceptional actions, himself acts in an extraordinary way by leaving his bed in the middle of the night. If Cuthbert is the paradigmatic single-focus protagonist, distancing himself from the identity of his group, the young monk is the paradigmatic single-focus reader, transformed into a voyeur through pure curiosity. The saint’s activities are mira-culous, the romance knight’s adventures are spec-tacular. All single-focus protagonists owe their very existence to the fact that their actions deserve to be seen, that their stories deserve to be told. Exhibitionist and voyeur, the protagonist and reader thus form an interdependent couple, locked together by one’s need to be seen, the other’s desire to see.
Already in classical times we find this protagonist/reader symbiosis projected into the text as a theme or plot device. When young Telemachus sets out in search of his famous father, he is regaled at every stop by a story of his father’s prowess. The son’s task is to seek, so the father must be worthy of being sought—and thus a fit subject for tales of adventure. If The Odyssey prefigures the numerous texts where relatively passive protagonists serve as repositories of knowledge, as the convenient ear justifying a tale (especially from the late Renaissance to the eighteenth century), Lucius Apuleius’s Metamorphoses or the Golden Ass provides the paradigm for the many single-focus texts built around the prying eyes of an actively curious narrator. Anxious to witness the marvels of Thessaly, preternaturally curious about the practice of witchcraft, Apuleius’s hero, Lucius, suddenly finds himself transformed into an ass—and thus able to observe in secret the enchantments of the provinces where he takes us. Centuries later, the nascent novel multiplies experiments with strange and wonderful narrators endowed with privileged or unusual vision. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Voltaire’s “Micromégas” employ this technique to philosophical and political ends, while Lesage’s Le Diable boîteux (where Asmodeus’s X-ray vision permits him to see through house tops) and Claude de Crébillon’s Le Sopha (which relates the memoirs of a sofa) prefer to titillate. Others use similar techniques to support fantastic tales or frankly pornographic accounts.
As Victor Shklovsky (1973) has shown in the case of Don Quixote—a button-brained eccentric born out of the necessity to fit material from many different traditions and genres into a single story—formal concerns often play an important role in generating specific character types. So it is with the tendency to turn single-focus protagonists into voyeurs, eavesdroppers, or detectives, for the dependence of single-focus narrative on a single pair of eyes would be severely limiting were those eyes not accorded special powers. Examples of this process include characters like Marivaux’s Jacob or Balzac’s Rastignac, who listen at doors, increasing the amount of information available through the central character. From Lazarillo de Tormes to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, the picaresque novel engages our interest by the quality and variety of the protagonist’s perception. The travel motif equips another set of characters with the oversized eyes and ears characteristic of single-focus narrative. Medieval texts like The Voyage of Brendan already follow this pattern, but it is with the age of discovery that the voyage motif comes into its own. Seventeenth-century nonfiction travel accounts soon give rise to eighteenth-century philosophical treatises like Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes or nineteenth-century tales of Romantic exile like Chateaubriand’s René and Atala.
The nineteenth-century novel as a whole devotes extraordinary technical energy to reconciling realistic limitations on vision with the need to carry desire into ever more forbidden arenas. Realist novels often combine protagonist mobility (providing access to unusual scenes) with protagonist insensitivity (stressing narrative irony, the reader recognizing the protagonist’s limitations). The French novel in particular is rife with examples of this type of personage (Julien Sorel, Emma Bovary, Gervaise Macquart). With Henry James the attraction of the limited point of view reaches its height, in the international psychological fashion of The Portrait of a Lady, the spine-chilling suspense of The Turn of the Screw, or the morbid naïveté of What Maisie Knew. Modern diary novels carry this process a step farther, featuring lonely, unhappy protagonists who, incapable of contact with others, become the object of their own gaze (Bonaventura’s Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura, Kierkegaard’s The Diary of a Seducer, Sartre’s La Nausée, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Svevo’s La Coscienza di Zeno).
Perhaps more striking still is single-focus narrative’s capacity to derive energy from revisionist versions of history. Starting with Wace’s twelfth-century Roman de Brut, the ferment that gave rise to medieval romance developed out of renewed attempts to discover the unknown byways of European history. The rise of the novel in seventeenth-century France owes a still more overt debt to historical voyeurism, for the histoire secrète and the nouvelle historique are overtly constructed as behind-the-scenes versions of what really happened in history, often concentrating on the amorous motivations of kings and queens reputed to have made decisions for reasons of state alone. The English and French memoir tradition similarly provides privileged information about well-known historical figures. A century later, under the influence of Walter Scott, the novel once again found new inspiration in historical subjects, thanks to protagonists’ ability to reveal details to which academic or traditional history had failed to provide access. From Scott’s Waverly to Prosper Mérimée’s Chronique du règne de Charles IX and Alfred de Vigny’s Cinq-Mars, the typical protagonist of a nineteenth-century historical novel is a young man with acute vision.
Curiosity is thus a fundamental component of single-focus syntax, on the part of the protagonist as well as that of the reader. Yet, as we all know, curiosity killed the cat. The dangers of curiosity have been regularly chronicled by writers of fiction and protectors of moral order. With Lucius’s transformation into an ass standing as a fit symbol, the price of man’s curious nature has been posted by texts as diverse as the various versions of the Pandora’s Box myth, the “Curioso impertinente” novella embedded in Don Quixote, and nineteenth-century fascination with scientific overreaching. The most celebrated critique of curiosity is contained in a letter from Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to William of Thierry, at the outset of the twelfth century, the first important period of widespread adoption of single-focus norms. Railing against the Benedictine art of his time, Bernard is careful to specify that his attack on curiositas does not cover all religious art, nor even all representational art, for where the categories and values of Christian doctrine are respected, church decoration is fully in accord with the church’s mission. What he does fear are carvings that divert attention from Christian symbolism, stressing instead pagan, secular, or purely aesthetic aspects. Bernard is well aware that innate human curiosity gravitates to unusual, unreligious details that fascinate precisely because they escape from the restrictions of doctrine. As Bernard sees it, Christian art requires a studied effort to avoid appealing to people as accidents of nature, to constitute them fully as defined by their Christian categories:
Beautiful pictures, varied sculptures, both adorned with gold, beautiful and precious cloths, beautiful weavings of varied colour, beautiful and precious windows, sapphire glass, gold-embroidered copes and chasubles, golden and jewelled chalices, gold letters in books: all these are not required for practical needs, but for the concupiscence of the eyes. (Schapiro 1977:7)
For Bernard, the problem lies not with overtly secular arts and texts, but with beautiful objects that pander to human curiosity in the name of the church.
A similar problem presides over early development of the novel. Vilified for its lack of a classical model, the novel at first justified its existence as a moral guide. Preface after preface during the novel’s formative period claims an intent to delight and instruct simultaneously. Consider the following frontispiece from one of the myriad crime story pamphlets that influenced the joint rise of the novel and single-focus narration in Elizabethan England:
Sundrye strange and inhumaine Murthers, lately committed. The first of a Father that hired a man to kill three of his children. . . . Wherein is described the odiousnesse of murther, with the vengeance which God inflicteth on murtherers (Marshburn and Velie 1973: frontispiece)
Along with assurance of crimes strange and inhumane—a juicy topic indeed—we are promised a moral tale specifically identifying and castigating the sins of the protagonist. Moralizing not only eases a potentially objectionable text past the societal (and personal) censor, it actually advertises the immorality that lures the curious single-focus reader. Books “banned in Boston” sell best. The pamphlet, ballad, and early novel build such censorship into their own structure by announcing from the outset that they will present immoral actions.
The overtly immoral content of early novels corresponds to a convenient change in their physical size and social deployment. During the first half of the seventeenth century in France, the dual-focus pastorals of a d’Urfé or Scudéry, meant to be read to a group, were printed in large quarto or octavo volumes (8 inches by 10 inches or larger). When these multiple-volume behemoths gave way during the latter half of the century to the single-focus texts of Du Plaisir, Saint-Réal, and de Lafayette, the new stories were systematically produced in a pocket-sized duodecimo or 16mo format (4 inches by 6 inches or smaller). For the reader of these novels, now alone in her room, each short novel provides both moral teaching and temptation—in short, a new opportunity to follow her curiosity into the unknown.
The structure of single-focus narratives is predicated on continuation of the curiosity that first brought the reader to the text. Fostered largely through hypothetical visions of the future—hopes, dreams, fears, and other aspects of the narrative level that Roland Barthes (1970) has dubbed the “hermeneutic” code—the single-focus reader’s dedication to reading always depends on curiosity about a veiled future. The uncertain future of romance or adventure novels typically involves the outcome of a physical combat. We continue to read psychological or philosophical novels in order to know what decisions will be made. The detective novel engages our interest by the promise of a solution for the crime. This investment in the future goes a long way toward explaining why the end looms so large in single-focus texts and why so much of what precedes is specifically end-oriented. In the dual-focus system, where the end is by and large known from the start, the process of reading takes on the character of ritual repetition, with each segment of the text recapitulating the whole, and each dual-focus text recalling familiar legal, moral, and economic codes. Single-focus readers, quite to the contrary, are forever projected forward toward an unknown or, rather, toward one more in a long series of unknowns, this one made to seem most important of all by the rhetoric of the text’s hermeneutic code.
The effect of continued investment of curiosity regarding the destiny of the protagonist is to bind the reader irreversibly to that destiny. While we must view the protagonist from without, we nevertheless imaginatively adopt the protagonist’s position when evaluating story data. When we learn of the machinations surrounding Balzac’s César Birotteau, we automatically evaluate them from his vantage point, even though we are privy to far more information than poor César. Each action, each thought, each deed projects us into a hypothetical future regarding the Parisian merchant’s chances of receiving the Legion of Honor and paying back his debts. However distant we remain from César, however severely we judge his actions, however ironically we view his hopes and fears, our interest in the protagonist’s future nevertheless binds us to him. No wonder, for the reader’s decision to continue reading always constitutes an investment of desire. Once that desire has been fixed on the protagonist, the protagonist becomes an extension of the reader’s own self, an indirect method of self-expression, a figure for the reader’s own identity. Like the single-focus protagonist, the single-focus reader enters into a speculation with each new investment. Never knowing ahead of time what kind of return to expect, the reader nevertheless expects that narrative contracts will be kept and that interest will be maintained.
On one side, then, are the traditional techniques of the hermeneutic code, enjoining us to care about and thus identify with the hero(ine)’s destiny: consistent following of the protagonist, subordination of all information to the protagonist’s trajectory, positing of a problem intimately tied to the protagonist, hypothesis of numerous potential solutions to this central problem, alternation between endangerment and safety of the protagonist. These familiar techniques, often accompanied by the creation of a particularly engaging central character, infallibly lure the reader into sharing the protagonist’s vision—that is, looking with the protagonist rather than simply looking at the protagonist, measuring the world against the protagonist’s desires instead of just measuring the protagonist against the world. With this identification comes a tendency to redefine every aspect of the plot in terms of its effect on the protagonist, along with a penchant to believe the protagonist, a willingness to take the protagonist as the text’s ultimate author.
At the same time, however, an entirely different set of indicators suggests a radically divergent type of identification on the reader’s part. Forever involved in a value speculation, the central character must go to great lengths to achieve success. Thus constantly given to exaggeration, to stretching the truth, to flights of rhetorical fancy, and even to outright lies (“fabulation,” we might say—it is not for nothing that single-focus protagonists insist on personally assuring the narrational function), single-focus protagonists are inferior informants who repay our confidence poorly indeed. While the characteristic techniques of the hermeneutic code induce reader identification with the protagonist, the protagonist’s own behavior often belies the reader’s confidence. Like Machiavelli’s Prince, single-focus protagonists require allegiance, not love; support rather than sympathy. In first-person narration, as critics since Wayne Booth (1961) have carefully documented, rare is the narrator who fully deserves the reader’s confidence. Where sins of commission are avoided, there remain the clever omissions exemplified by Marivaux’s Jacob, whose bland account of success in society steers clear of aspects that might be seen as compromising. Third-person narration might seem to protect the protagonist against such accusations, the narrator taking responsibility for the narration, but this assumption neglects the tendency of single-focus narrative to attribute major narrational responsibility to the protagonist, even in stories where the focal character does not do the telling.
Pride and Prejudice offers an especially clear example of the characteristically contradictory identification signals emitted by single-focus texts. Organized around Elizabeth Bennet’s growth into a mature woman capable of understanding her own mistakes and thus the particularity of her own character, Pride and Prejudice alternately relates Elizabeth’s decisions and her modifications of those decisions. On no single character in the novel do her opinions remain unchanged throughout. We readers are consequently obliged to do some fancy footwork in order to maintain comfortable identification with Elizabeth. As much as her first decision to spurn a would-be husband fosters increased identification with Elizabeth (for Collins’s inflated sense of self-satisfaction clearly renders him unacceptable for such a sensitive and humble woman), her refusals of Wickham and Darcy, on contradictory grounds, increase our doubts about her ability to evaluate situations correctly. Eventually, Elizabeth’s soul-searching in response to Darcy’s long letter sets her onto a more reasonable course, dissolving the contradiction between our identification and our suspicion of her decisions. In the meantime, the novel has gained its life and assured its readership by the long middle section, during which Elizabeth retains our sympathy and remains the object of our identification, all the while giving us reason to doubt her conclusions and thus her right to occupy the narrational role.
Novel after single-focus novel simultaneously fosters two, seemingly contradictory, modes of participation: identification and suspicion, the latter often appearing through narratorial irony. Consider Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir and its engaging hero, Julien Sorel. Few novels provide more motivation for identification. Yet seldom, as Victor Brombert has demonstrated (1954), does a narrator have more fun at the expense of a character. As much as identification is essential to appreciating the novel, suspicion and irony are needed to understand its complexity. Who can fail to appreciate the youthful idealism of Werther, Wilhelm Meister, Waverly, or Frédéric Moreau? Yet who would take their conclusions, pronouncements, and dreams at face value? The genius of single-focus narrative is to assure constant oscillation between identification and suspicion, irony, or judgment. Readers alternate between a participatory present, sharing the protagonist’s position, and a retrospective stance permitting recognition of the central character’s foibles. Each single-focus reader’s individuality derives from a particular fashion of negotiating this double identification and the dialectic it engenders.
This dialectic is heavily conditioned by the factual/artifactual opposition. If dual-focus characters commonly take the world and language as givens, never suspecting them of masking the truth, of producing rhetorical effects, single-focus characters develop their full complexity only when they begin to interrogate the world for concealed messages. Dual-focus characters recognize symbolic effects, but only single-focus characters regularly question the fundamental transparency of words and things, thereby generating a problem of significant proportions for single-focus readers. When a character produces an interpretation of the facts set forth in the text, are we to read this reading factually or artifactually? We have every reason to take the interpretation at face value: we have followed the protagonist from belief to suspicion; we have participated in the process whereby a deeper truth was made to emerge from a series of seemingly superficial givens; and we have been convinced by the protagonist’s newfound sincerity, self-knowledge, or acumen. At first, Elizabeth believes Wickham’s account of his past, blindly condemning Darcy and remaining in the factual mode of reading characteristic of dual-focus narrative, where words offer a transparent view of the truth. Yet Elizabeth soon reconsiders her hasty conclusions. With Darcy’s letter in hand, she analyzes anew the facts of the case, this time measuring motives as she goes. A new conclusion emerges: indirect evidence is more useful in reckoning the truth than the self-serving pronouncements of the perfidious Wickham. The reader, at this point, would be hard put to disagree with Elizabeth’s conclusions.
Yet there remains something incongruous about the reader’s factual reading of Elizabeth’s artifactual conclusions. Out of this incongruity a second reading is generated, based on identification with Elizabeth’s method, not her conclusions. Taking appropriate distance from this marriageable young woman, we suspect that multiple motivations may underlie her change of heart. When at first she refused Wickham and Collins and vilified Darcy, no one around her had yet been married—is her change of heart unrelated to the example of her friends and sisters? When she first concluded that Darcy was unworthy, she had not yet seen his country manor—does the splendor of Pemberley have no effect on the provincial lass? When she first condemned Darcy, she had neither been courted by him nor had she a rival for his hand—does competition from Lady Catherine de Bourgh and her daughter not influence the proud Elizabeth? Once we engage an artifactual reading of Elizabeth’s behavior, of her own artifactual reading process, a vast arena for interpretation opens up, revealing a multiplicity of possible Elizabeths. When her reading of Darcy’s letter causes her to exclaim, “Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly” (Austen 1966:144), we are rightly suspicious of a conclusion that conceals as many of Elizabeth’s emotions as it reveals. Suddenly Elizabeth becomes a character of far more potential depth, a complex individual with whom we can readily identify but whom we would as lief interrogate and interpret.
What I have called “identification” involves factual acceptance of the protagonist’s artifactual reading activity. What I have termed “suspicion” depends on adoption of an artifactual reading process with regard to the protagonist. The characteristic single-focus dialectic of identification derives from a structured alternation between these two positions. To be sure, not all single-focus texts present the same opportunities for this dialectic. Some tales create such complete sympathy for the protagonist that only the most cantankerous reader could expect anything but total sincerity and accuracy. Others provide reading matter for young people (like the biographies of famous men and women that occupied my youth) but take limited advantage of the complexities implicit in the single-focus form. By negating the potential insufficiencies of the protagonist, they deprive us of a major component of single-focus reading pleasure. Many modern novels present ample justification for reader suspicion but give readers little cause for the identification without which the suspicion rings hollow (e.g., the line of novels inaugurated by Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and perpetuated by Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Albert Camus’s The Fall, and Svevo’s La Coscienza di Zeno).
The most successful single-focus texts, the ones that are reread for generations, simultaneously inspire confidence and suspicion, identification and distance. Perhaps this is why medieval romances have retained their popularity over the centuries while saints’ lives have led only a cloistered existence. Who can doubt a saint? For that matter, who can fully identify with one? What intrigues us about Tristan, Lancelot, and Gawain is the complex nature of their motivation. Opened up to multiple interpretations, their motives play a role in the reader’s own establishment of individuality.
Consider the development of the detective novel since Poe and Doyle. Though C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes are solitary, impenetrable figures, nothing in their comportment permits us to suspect their motives in solving crimes. Whenever Hammett’s Sam Spade or Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer works a case, however, we get the uneasy feeling that his crime-solving activities are motivated by some dark secret in his own background, that he solves crimes more out of a personal grudge than a sense of justice. Spade and Hammer are fascinating because of the suspicion they instill—at the very moment they are drawing us in to greater identification. The more the process of crime solution is overdetermined, motivated out of personal and legal commitments, the more the reader enters into the full single-focus identification dialectic.
The process by which single-focus readers adopt artifactual reading methods elucidates the difference between reader positioning in dual-focus and single-focus texts. In dual-focus narrative, the notion of interchangeability, of potential substitution, reigns over the text. If a commander dies on the field of battle, another individual may be—must be—substituted. Charlemagne, Roland, and a simple foot-soldier differ only in degree, not in kind, for all belong to the category out of which The Song of Roland is generated: Christianity. All who share the same focus are potentially interchangeable, while all who are on opposite sides of the text’s paradigmatic bar are utterly unsubstitutable (the impossibility of substituting pagans for Christians or men for women providing the underlying logic of texts like The Song of Roland and Daphnis and Chloe). The process of substitution rapidly overflows the text itself, encompassing wider and wider audiences, eventually including readers and listeners in the circle of potential substitutions. The typical dual-focus relationship to the text’s characters is thus a metaphorical one, with readers experiencing the text from the position of those characters for whom they are substitutable.
In single-focus texts, to the contrary, readers spy on protagonists while they are spying on someone else, judge protagonists while they are judging someone else, “read” protagonists while they too are engaged in reading. In other words, while dual-focus reading coincides with the character’s experience, single-focus readers are attached to the text as one more in a series (e.g., as a current Christian in the line of Jesus-Anthony-Hilarion-Benedict-Gregory . . . , each imitating the previous link in an unbroken chain of metonymic relationships stretching all the way to today). Instead of reliving adventures, fitting into a prescribed mold and fully identifying with the hero, as in the dual-focus scheme, single-focus readers experience protagonists as models to be interpreted, as sources of our own individuality. In the text, the protagonist’s role is to view the surrounding world, but in the reading process, the protagonist shifts roles to become the object viewed and evaluated by the reader. This process, which lies at the heart of single-focus reading practices, may be called the “metonymic shift,” for it involves a shift in identification that occurs according to the sliding, contiguous pattern commonly identified with metonymy.
The history of Western drama, as chronicled by Karl Young (1933), provides a particularly significant example of the metonymic shift. In the chancel drama generally taken by historians as the simplest (and by extension—though the conclusion does not necessarily follow—the earliest) medieval ancestor of modern theater, the three Marys come to the tomb in search of the crucified Jesus. “Whom do you seek?” the angels say to them. “Jesus Christ who was crucified,” they respond, to which the angels retort: “He is no longer here. He is resurrected.” In subsequent versions, this kernel is rounded out with additional material, including the encounter between the Marys and the apostles Peter and John, who ask the same question as the Marys had earlier addressed to the angels.
One could hardly imagine a simpler story, yet in terms of the Christian contribution to single-focus thematics and technique, the “Quem quaeritis” drama (so called by its first Latin words, meaning “Whom do you seek?”) reveals manifold and far-reaching ramifications. The first regards the new approach to theophany present in the Gospels. Where the Old Testament promised flesh-and-blood presence (e.g., Exodus 19:11, “the Lord will come down upon Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people”), provided visible signs (e.g., the burning bush of Exodus 3), and called its God “Being” (JHWH), the New Testament has nothing but an empty tomb to offer. Far from producing Jesus, the Christian theophany reveals nothing but an absence. But along with that absence it provides an interpreter. “He is no longer here,” the angels say. And then they continue, asserting, “He is resurrected.” Between these two lines stands the entire logical system on which Christianity and single-focus narrative alike are founded: an absence is not just a lack of presence but a vacuum inviting the reader to create a presence through interpretation. The empty tomb is not a fact, but an artifact, an invitation to interpretation, a summons to signification.
Chancel drama portrays this exhortation particularly well. In the initial scene, the Marys expect to find Jesus dead, but the angels have already concluded that the absence of a dead man here means the presence of a living being elsewhere. As such, the angels serve as models for the hesitant Marys. Seconds later, all hesitation gone, the Marys encounter two disciples intent on discovering the fate of their Master. This time it is the Marys who take on the role of the angels, convincing Peter and John that their Master is risen. Subsequent scenes generated by this pattern implicitly represent the good news (i.e., interpretation) reported by Peter and John to two more disciples, and so on, all the way to the present audience, final link in the chain of faith begun by the Marys at the tomb. With each shift, students become teachers, those who were sure of death become convinced of life, and doubters confronted by an assertion now find themselves asserting.
Christian theophanies take place in the heart, the only place where the text’s absence can be made into a presence. In place of Judaism’s ever-present laws, Jesus stresses parables, lacking a universally applicable conclusion. Christians remain responsible for providing an interpretation, for inserting their own beliefs into the empty tomb. Following this logic to its conclusion, Protestant reformers refused to recognize any marker, other than belief, of a Christian’s justification. Says Martin Luther: “It is clear, then, that a Christian has all that he needs in faith and needs no works to justify him; and if he has no need of works, he has no need of the law” (1960:284). If all that is needed is faith, we might add to this passage from the Treatise on Christian Liberty, then no one else can say whether or not a Christian is justified, for no one else can possibly know the state of an individual’s faith. Fundamentally single-focus in orientation, the Protestant Reformation had an enormous effect in bringing single-focus modes of thought to counterreformers and independent thinkers like Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal. It also brought important innovations that contributed heavily to the development of the novel: the importance of the individual, a tendency toward internalization, and emphasis on the practice of solitary reading.
Because they fit more neatly into the causally connected, beginning-middle-and-end model that has long dominated definitions of narrative, single-focus strategies are better known than their dual-focus counterparts. In order to find substantial clusters of dual-focus texts, we have to visit the relatively distant traditions of Greek pastoral, Christian martyrs’ lives, and the medieval epic or culturally disenfranchised forms like serial novels, comic strips, and genre films, whereas single-focus texts are readily found in the more familiar modes of biography, confession, romance, and novels of many sorts—psychological, memoir, realist, naturalist, detective. Though single-focus narratives vary enormously in terms of subject matter, style, and structure, the single-focus approach is readily recognizable through the following shared traits:
If dual-focus narrative presents a timeless conflict over fixed values and limited resources, single-focus texts view the world as a limitless domain where enterprising individuals can discover and exploit new values. As such, single-focus narrative is particularly well suited to expanding societies and confident cultures. In order to assure their fate, dual-focus characters have only to follow rules that are apparent to all. For the single-focus protagonist, to the contrary, everything is done at a certain risk. In order to gain the right to play for enormous potential rewards—whether financial, moral, or otherwise—single-focus characters must expose themselves to a very real potential for substantial losses. Where the fate of dual-focus characters is typically reported by an Olympian narrator whose knowledge is unimpeachable, single-focus destinies are judged by limited narrators and readers who must base their conclusions on scant and sometimes slanted information. Single-focus values always depend on intentions rather than on completed actions, thereby placing a premium on interpretation—and therefore on rhetoric designed to skew that interpretation. Although dual-focus readers are a confident lot, knowing exactly where value lies and how to evaluate individual characters, single-focus readers must typically develop a level of suspicion unknown in the dual-focus world. Reading single-focus texts is thus a complex affair, involving the same kind of speculation and lack of certainty that characterizes single-focus protagonists and their attempts to make sense of the world and create their position in it.