SEVEN    Multiple-Focus Narrative

When a text follows several different characters, I speak of “multiple-focus narrative.” Many multiple-focus narratives involve multiple plots. In fact, British theater’s tendency toward multiple plots (as compared with French classical theater’s spare unity-of-action style) is primarily responsible for much important writing about texts that attend to several different characters (Empson 1950, Dryden 1965, Levin 1971). But it is important not to confuse multiple-plot texts with the more general approach of multiple-focus narration. Whereas all multiple-plot texts are by definition multiple-focus, many multiple-focus narratives are organized around a single plot. Indeed, the level and type of a text’s multiplicity is one of the main topics addressed by critics considering the broad questions related to multiplot novels (e.g., Maatje 1964, Garrett 1980, Bakhtin 1981,). While in this chapter I consider many texts with multiple plots, my primary concern is the more general question of multiple-focus narration.

Characterized by a following-pattern that attends to several separate characters, multiple-focus narratives offer many opportunities for interpretation through the dual-focus or single-focus approaches presented in the preceding chapters. It is even tempting to consider that all narrative texts can be treated as a combination of single-focus and dual-focus modes. Books that recount the stories of multiple, apparently unrelated, individuals—like Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and John Hersey’s Hiroshima—might easily be configured as a combination of individual single-focus tales. However diverse the cast of characters followed in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist, many readers are likely to reduce that multiplicity to manageable proportions, either by organizing the novel’s material around the title character or by treating each new episode and character as part of a familiar dual-focus replacement operations sequence. The separate sections of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance are so obviously composed of self-contained dual-focus stories that they were eventually distributed as separate films.

Indeed, it is not uncommon for a text that clearly operates according to dual-focus or single-focus principles to begin with a section characterized by multiple-focus following, or vice versa. Though Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice eventually leave little doubt as to their single-focus identity, they both commence by introducing many different characters, apparently inviting readers to interpret the text according to multiple-focus standards. While both novels settle rapidly into a single-focus configuration, others take much longer to resolve a multiple-focus following-pattern into a familiar single-focus or dual-focus arrangement or to shift from an apparently single-focus arrangement to a multiple-focus following-pattern. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary follows Charles for several chapters before definitively settling on Emma. George Eliot’s Middlemarch follows Dorothea for ten full chapters before spinning out to fuller treatment of provincial life and its actors. Many a Grail romance begins by following a single knight before unexpectedly expanding the following-pattern to several others.

In one sense, the writing and reading of multiple-focus narratives is like tightrope walking—great care is needed to avoid falling off the multiple-focus high wire into the safety nets provided by single-focus and dual-focus traditions. Though they may employ familiar constitutive units, the most interesting multiple-focus texts develop important new types of meaning, beyond the single-focus and dual-focus strategies analyzed in the preceding chapters. Not only do the formal aspects of multiple-focus texts differ from the patterns displayed by their single-focus and dual-focus counterparts, but also multiple-focus spectators are positioned in a radically new manner. From the complexity of its typical following-pattern to the implied critique of dual-focus and single-focus organization that it presents, the multiple-focus mode offers a separate approach to narrative construction and meaning. Multiple-focus texts thrive on discontinuity, forcing characters and readers alike to devise novel methods of deriving meaning from apparently unrelated fragments. This process is especially salient in medieval Grail romances.

Illegitimate Narration

At a key moment of Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Roman de Perceval, the handsome and courageous knight Gawain is accused of having killed his host’s father. Outnumbered, far from the protection of Arthur’s court, Gawain appears doomed, condemned to a fight to the death with the dead man’s son. In extremis, however, he is offered an alternative: if within a year’s time he can bring back the bleeding lance that pierced Christ’s side, then he will be set free. His life in danger, Gawain dismisses his servants and sets out alone to find the bleeding lance. Suddenly the narrator interjects:

Neither of them nor of their sadness

Do I have any further desire to speak.

Of Sir Gawain the tale

Has no more to say at all

But starts in on Perceval. (1959:vv. 6212–16)

For three hundred verses we follow Perceval through a memory loss, five years of wandering, and a religious lesson from a hermit, who turns out to be the young knight’s uncle. Having promised to join the hermit in two days of penitence, Perceval takes communion on Easter Sunday. Then:

Of Perceval no longer

Does the tale speak here;

Instead you will have first heard

Much about Sir Gawain

Before you hear me tell of him again. (1959:vv. 6514–18)

“The tale,” as Chrétien puts it, would appear to have a mind of its own. Previously, Chrétien had always held his tale firmly in check. In Cligés he had followed the familiar dual-focus practice of alternating between two separated lovers. In Yvain he had contributed to nascent single-focus technique by sticking with the title character throughout, even when temporary madness strips him of mind, speech, and clothes alike. Yet in Perceval, the title character is regularly forced to relinquish control over the following-pattern. So unconventional is this procedure that the narrator refuses to take responsibility for the poem’s repeated ruptures. Narrative discontinuity must be blamed on “the tale” itself.

The difference between this narrative disruption and its single-focus and dual-focus counterparts is striking. The metaphoric modulations that characterize dual-focus narrative immediately identify the grounds justifying their existence. “Meanwhile,” “in a similar situation,” “no less confused,” and dozens of other formulas are employed to stress, from the outset, the logic uniting successive following-units. Even when no descriptive term identifies the connection between one following-unit and the next, grammatical or formal parallelism eases the transition, for the two foci always provide an invisible symmetrical armature for the unfolding of the tale. Though told in time, dual-focus narrative constantly relies on its fundamentally spatial structure to domesticate the apparent multiplicity of its following-pattern. As we flit about the Mediterranean in the Alexandrian romance—from lover to pirate to loved one to rival—we always know immediately where to place each new following-unit. Every apparent multiplicity is instantaneously reduced by the dual-focus structure to a new version of a familiar duality.

The metonymic modulations of single-focus narrative involve a similar reduction. Though Pride and Prejudice brings numerous characters into contact with Elizabeth Bennet, some of whom are followed momentarily or described in detail, we regularly connect each of them to Elizabeth’s experience and evaluate them from her point of view. Similarly, secondary characters and eccentric following-units in Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Pierre de Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady are all subordinated to the life of the heroine by a reader predisposed by the single-focus following-pattern to weigh each new following-unit in terms of its ability to shed light on the one character without whom the others would have no reason for being.

The fashion begun by Chrétien’s Perceval wreaks havoc with the comfortable habits developed by readers of dual-focus and single-focus texts. Metonymic and metaphoric modulations provide immediate justification for their existence, along with grounds for unification of preceding and succeeding following-units (thus exerting a settling influence, which reinforces the reader’s comfortably unified identity), but hyperbolic modulations actively deny familiar expectations. Take the case of La Quête du Graal (La Queste del Saint-Graal), the most important of the many thirteenth-century prose imitations and continuations of Chrétien’s Grail romance. After having successfully concluded numerous adventures and resisted various temptations, Perceval is sent off into the unknown on a mysterious boat. “Fear not,” he is told, “for wherever you may go God will be with you. Soon you will see Bohort and Galahad, the companions you are longing to meet again” (1965:154). Setting out onto uncharted seas, Perceval is promised exciting adventures, divine protection, and the fulfillment of his desires. Far from permitting us to follow Perceval’s adventures, however, the narrator abruptly yanks us away from the pure-hearted seafarer, about whom “the tale ceases to speak,” transferring us instead to the worldly Lancelot. Numerous encounters later, Lancelot finds himself in mortal combat with a knight in black armor, who has risen out of the sea. His horse slain under him, Lancelot is backed up to a cliff, closed in on three sides: behind him the rocks, to one side the sea, to the other a dense forest. While Lancelot resorts to the ultimate hope of prayer, the reader trembles for the knight’s life, but the narrator blithely announces that “here the tale leaves Lancelot and returns to Gawain” (183). Every one of our expectations, conditioned by single-focus and dual-focus narrative, is frustrated by the multiple-focus technique of hyperbolic modulation.

The logic underlying hyperbolic modulation is nowhere more clearly explained than in André Gide’s The Counterfeiters (Les Faux-monnayeurs), which is doubled by the author’s journal of the novel’s creation. Throughout the novel, Gide systematically refuses to follow plot developments to their logical conclusion, preferring to leave a character or conflict rather than take a chance on letting traditional concerns usurp the reader’s interest. “Never take advantage of acquired momentum,” says Gide in the Journal des Faux-monnayeurs (1932: vol. 13, p. 50), thus enunciating a fundamental rule of multiple-focus composition. Like Gide’s most active novelistic characters—Lafcadio in Lafcadio’s Adventures (Les Caves du Vatican) and Bernard in The Counterfeiters—each new segment, each successive following-unit must be an enfant naturel, an illegitimate child. Although single-focus and dual-focus texts allow each segment to give legitimate birth to its successor, multiple-focus texts thrive on illegitimacy and its guarantee of a new start, a freshness unavailable to the legitimate heir.

Of course, the social status of the bastard is hardly a comfortable one. Never was anyone introduced as “the illegitimate son of so-and-so,” conventional morality requiring dissimulation of a state that falls outside of socially approved practices. The same situation exists in narrative, where hyperbolic modulation is perpetually branded with the stigma of social unacceptability. Medieval authors often blame discontinuity on a previously existing tale, thereby absolving the narrator of switching characters in mid-action. Modern authors take advantage of the implied disclaimer contained in a stretch of white space separating one following-unit from the next. The need to justify hyperbolic modulation by inserting white spaces in the text led Lodovico Ariosto to divide Orlando furioso into almost five thousand stanzas. In a similar manner, the prose romances of the late Renaissance used the license provided by white space to authorize inclusion of a wide variety of written forms: not only do we hop from character to character and from continent to continent, but also we flit regularly from straight narration to included stories, letters, poems, tomb inscriptions, legal manuals, and what-have-you.

The ultimate consecration of white space as justification for hyperbolic modulation came, surprisingly, in the quarrel over Pierre Corneille’s controversial theatrical masterpiece, Le Cid. In the public debate over the type of liaisons (connections between scenes) that should be allowed, a conservative view rapidly prevailed. According to this dominant opinion, the baroque practice of locating successive scenes in diverse places with different characters must be abandoned. Successive scenes must assure continuity by the continued presence of at least one actor. Between one act and the next, however, a complete change of actors may be tolerated. As consecrated by the 1640s in plays by Mairet and Corneille, French classical dramatic theory prescribed what I have called metonymic modulations between scenes but allowed metaphoric or hyperbolic modulations between acts. By the century’s end, this logic had been transferred to the question of chapter divisions within the novel.

Only with late-nineteenth-century multiple-focus narrative, however, would white space between chapters begin to play its full role. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, chapter divisions corresponded more often to the passage of time than to a radical change of character or plot line. Dividing their texts into ten or fifteen chapters gave novelists a desirable organizational aid, but it hardly provided the cover necessary for a major campaign of hyperbolic modulations. Consider the change in chapter allocation that accompanied Émile Zola’s conversion to multiple-focus organization. His early single-focus novels (Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, L’Assommoir, Nana) average only a dozen chapters; his later multiple-focus efforts explode into a multitude of short fragments (e.g., forty chapters for Germinal and thirty for La Terre), each generally justifying a new hyperbolic modulation. It takes D. H. Lawrence thirty-one chapters to wind through the interlaced multiple plots of Women in Love, while John Hersey’s Hiroshima follows André Malraux’s practice in La Condition humaine of supplementing chapter divisions by the liberal use of white space to separate sections dealing with different characters. Whether in the allegorical drawings of Pieter Bruegel, the plates of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, or the eccentric following-patterns of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Gide’s Counterfeiters, a little bit of white space serves to justify juxtapositions that would otherwise have been deemed inappropriate.

Carnivalization

Pick a day, any day. Whom did you see all day? Chances are they were people like you: people who live on the same block, work in the same office, go to the same church, shop in the same store. Day in, day out, we see the same people. Not the exact same people, but the same sort of people, the ones who share our schedules and lifestyles. The nightshift factory worker drinks coffee with other nightshift factory workers, not with day-shift policemen. The farmer stops to discuss the weather with another farmer, not with a longshoreman. The kindergarten mom waits for her five-year-old alongside other parents with small children. Only rarely are we thrust into regular contact with others unlike us.

We do encounter a limited amount of difference whenever we use public transportation, but it usually takes an emergency, interrupting the normal pace of life, to radically change our regular pattern of contacts with people like us. Carnivals are designed to produce a similar effect. Engineered to attract people of all types by staging strange and unknown experiences, carnivals invite people of diverse backgrounds, occupations, and classes to live the experience of difference. If the carnival is any event, any place, any time when the “normal” tendency to stick to one’s own kind may be “normally” transgressed, then multiple-focus texts constitute the ultimate in narrative carnivalization. Constantly choosing special circumstances favoring juxtaposition—not of opposites (the heart of dual-focus narrative) but of apparently unrelated individuals—multiple-focus texts offer a variety rarely seen in their single-focus or dual-focus counterparts.

Several devices are regularly deployed in favor of this variety. Renaissance narrative reveals a predilection for minimally motivated story collections (Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the anonymous Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles, and Marguerite de Navarre’s L’Heptaméron). Early modern novels often use the “Spanish Inn” strategy to lend realism to texts by including diverse characters and their stories (Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Paul Scarron’s Le Roman comique, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews). To justify the promiscuous mixing of populations, later multiple-focus texts employ crowd scenes (Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris), wars (Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace), general strikes (Zola’s Germinal), revolutions (Malraux’s La Condition humaine), or a breach in the normal physical order of events (Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey). Hollywood catastrophe films guarantee variety by concentrating on public spaces during natural disasters and similar events (George Seaton’s Airport, John Guillermin’s The Towering Inferno, Mark Robson’s Earthquake, and dozens of look-alikes). One of the most frequent devices for assuring the carnivalesque mixing of classes, professions, and sexes involves the emergency status provoked by a plague (The Decameron, Albert Camus’s La Peste) or a nuclear attack (John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Nicholas Meyer’s The Day After). Mikhail Bakhtin provides many more examples in his groundbreaking study of carnivalization, Rabelais and His World (1968).

Consistently, multiple-focus texts posit a level of unity beyond that of single individuals. Often, a public event is used to justify a multiple-focus following-pattern, with each individual providing only one piece of a mosaic that is of necessity transindividual in nature. Victor Hugo’s first major novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, begins with an evocation of festivities at the Paris Palais de Justice on January 6, 1482. After a first chapter devoted to a general description of the crowd waiting to watch a mystery play, a second, entitled “Pierre Gringoire,” concentrates on the author’s difficulty in getting his play under way. The remaining four chapters in this first book take their titles from the major figures of the novel’s plot who are followed in turn: “Monsieur le Cardinal,” “Maître Jacques Coppenole,” “Quasimodo,” and “Esmeralda.” The chapter units thus mirror the multiple-focus following-pattern, but the first book as a whole comes to a close only when the event is itself complete. Hugo’s method of dividing his novel into books and chapters (like the chapter/fragment approach chosen by many twentieth-century multiple-focus authors) reveals the fundamental structural duality operative throughout the multiple-focus tradition: while one level is regulated by the following-pattern, with its characteristic discontinuity and multiplicity, a higher level unifies that multiplicity around an event or theme of a broader nature.

The master of multiple-focus narration in the service of a major event is, of course, Leo Tolstoy. Book 2 of War and Peace, for example, provides a multiple-character, multiple-location look at Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1805. We follow numerous major characters, both historical and fictional. Each one of the sixteen individual chapters is unified by attention to a single individual. Between chapters, however, there is rarely any direct connection. We flit from camp to camp and from character to character through the seeming sole justification provided by the events that constitute the campaign of 1805. As a result, the reader is constantly challenged to read on two radically different levels: that of character and that of event. Tolstoy’s treatment of the skirmish at Schön Grabern, which ends book 2, typifies multiple-focus handling of events. In the chapters preceding the battle, we follow aide-de-camp Prince Andrew Bolkónski to the Austrian court, where in rapid succession we visit the Austrian Minister of War, Bolkónski’s friend Bilíbin, Hippolyte Kurágin and his effete friends, and the Emperor Francis.

After draining all he possibly can from following Prince Andrew, Tolstoy abandons him for bigger game. First concentrating on the desperate position of the Russian commander in chief, Kutúzov, Tolstoy then details the unorthodox attempts of the French advance guard commander, Murat, finally quoting at length a letter from Napoleon censuring Murat’s initiatives. When Bolkónski is assigned to a fighting division under the command of General Bagratión, Tolstoy uses him as an introduction to the artillery brigade commanded by Túshin, the forces deployed along the front lines, and even an uneasy conversation between Dólokhov and a French grenadier. Having prepared us for the battle with half-a-dozen views of every level—from emperor to simple soldier—Tolstoy devotes four further chapters to the thick of the battle itself. If at first we observe both Túshin’s artillery regiment and Bagratión’s decision-making through Prince Andrew’s eyes, we soon are invited by a white space on the page to view instead the rout of the right flank and the flight of young Nicholas Rostóv. After a closeup of Dólokhov’s heroism and an extended view of the breakup of the artillery regiment, Tolstoy brings all the major actors of the battle together for a sort of postmortem: Bolkónski, Bagratión, Túshin, Rostóv.

Halfway through the next book, Prince Andrew Bolkónski and the young Nicholas Rostóv are confronted over their respective roles at Schön Grabern and, implicitly, over the type of account that best represents the battle. Giving in to his familiarity with conventional accounts of military heroism, Nicholas has just given a standard first-person account of the events, the kind that would attract Henry Fleming (in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage) into active Civil War duty:

His hearers expected a story of how beside himself and all aflame with excitement, he had flown like a storm at the square, cut his way in, slashed right and left, how his saber had tasted flesh and he had fallen exhausted, and so on. And so he told them all that. (Tolstoy 1966:260)

A few seconds later, infused with his borrowed heroism, Nicholas flies up at Prince Andrew, for whom such battlefield accounts are only so many “stories”:

“Yes, many stories! But our stories are the stories of men who have been under the enemy’s fire! Our stories have some weight, not like the stories of those fellows on the staff who get rewards without doing anything!” (261)

Prince Andrew may have a general idea of how silly Nicholas’s evaluation is, but only the reader (who has witnessed the behavior under fire of both men) understands the full degree of the young soldier’s hypocrisy. Constantly drawing attention to the manner in which his tales are narrated—not only through his characters’ discussions but also by means of his own massive commentary, particularly toward the end of the novel—Tolstoy regularly emphasizes his refusal of traditional single-focus and dual-focus accounts of war. Seen from every possible angle, each battle is not just a moment in the development of an individual (as it is, say, in The Red Badge of Courage), nor is it simply one more archetypically determined episode in an eternal struggle between Us and the Enemy (as in The Song of Roland). Instead, Tolstoy’s battles constitute independent events, existing through, but nevertheless beyond and above, the characters who live them.

If the typical single-focus battle account is largely linear and one-dimensional in nature, stressing the lines tying every event to the protagonist, and if dual-focus wars tend to be two-dimensional, built on tension within a flat area, Tolstoy’s multiple-focus approach succeeds in adding a third dimension, thereby offering a full sense of the volume of events. Single-focus technique constantly pulls the reader back to the camera constituted by the main character. All possible interest is located on the line linking the protagonist to the objects of his or her vision. Rarely allowed to stray from that vector, the reader concentrates on moving back and forth from war to warrior. The dual-focus approach sets out a compartmentalized space, dominated by conflicting areas that keep the reader on the surface of the text, fitting all data into symmetrical areas that rarely exploit the notion of depth. With multiple-focus technique, we find a studied attempt to provide that depth. Battles never appear out of nowhere but are prepared in terms of time as well as space. We know who has done what, where, and why. A map is often needed to help us connect the individual fragments that are all we will be given. Instead of being directly narrated, the battle must be pieced together by the reader, through reference to a series of following-units, each affording a different angle, a different play of light and shadow, and so a different view of the battle’s reality. The event in all its volume takes on a meaning and an existence of its own, one to which only the reader can claim full access.

What is true of battles has been equally true of similar historical events since the mid-nineteenth-century revival of the multiple-focus form. Clearly linked to the rise of journalism, multiple-focus texts share both journalism’s attempt to get to the bottom of any given event, no matter how many different reporters it might take, and journalism’s recourse to the editor figure as final arbiter of the organization of individual accounts. Whereas single-focus and dual-focus authors are usually presented as creators, the multiple-focus author is often styled as the editor of preexisting material. An art of juxtaposition rather than invention, multiple-focus narration does not need to create the materials from which it is built. Whether the raw material of individual multiple-focus following-units is traditional (Grail romances), narrated by someone other than the principal narrator (story collections, “Spanish Inn” novels), written by someone other than the principal narrator (multiple-writer epistolary novels), historical (the late-nineteenth-century novel), derived from stock footage (historical documentary films), assembled from existing fragments of reality (cubism), or made up of interviews (newspaper articles), this raw material gains its specifically multiple-focus sense only when integrated by an editor into a coherent—albeit interlaced—narrative.

It is no accident that multiple-focus texts often have a documentary “feel.” From Zola’s naturalistic essays on mining, peasant life, and urban squalor, through the postwar documentary impulse of Hersey’s Hiroshima and Italian neorealism (or, for that matter, American neorealism in such films as William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives), to the success of docudramas like The Day After, multiple-focus narrative seems incapable of renewing itself without a constant return to the wellspring of history—not what actually happened, but an event or set of events with the depth, complexity, and volume of a historical incident. Even a nondocumentary novel like Gide’s The Counterfeiters regularly claims to be reporting independently existing real activities, thereby maintaining a richness and a thickness that surpass the ability of any single account—or even multiple accounts—to represent them. Like Chrétien in Perceval and Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris, Gide constantly deploys the familiar device of refusing to take responsibility for the actions of his own characters, on the grounds that they are not characters but real beings, who enjoy the independence and carry the responsibility of real beings.

One of the surprising effects of multiple-focus narrative’s documentary penchant is a strong tendency away from storytelling altogether. This pattern can be seen at its purest in the corporate report. Since the goal is not to trace the rise and fall of any individual but to document the state of a particular corporation, the following-pattern chosen is typically multiple-focus in nature. The report moves from one division to another in an effort to define the state of the abstract entity constituted by the corporation. While an anecdote here or there may be appropriate, the ultimate goal is clearly not narrative in nature, at least not in the traditional sense of the term.

Multiple-focus literature is only slightly less susceptible to this antinarrative impulse. Beginning with the late-medieval allegorical tendency to reduce the narrative interlace of Grail romances to a symbolic, moralizing framework, multiple-focus literary texts have developed numerous techniques for undermining the intrinsic narrative interest of their component following-units. From The Decameron to The Heptameron and from Don Quixote to Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître, Renaissance and early modern texts typically provide a social or philosophical context, inviting a static reinterpretation of the included tale’s dynamic narrative. Nineteenth-century multiple-focus novels often sidetrack narrative interest through authorial commentary. Balzac and Zola may concentrate most of their direct philosophizing and politicking in their critical texts, but other authors fill their novels with commentary designed to generalize the case of an individual character, thus lifting a seemingly single-focus or dual-focus fragment out of its local narrative context and placing it in a broader social, political, or philosophical framework. The novels of Hugo, Eugène Sue, Dickens, and Tolstoy depend on constant narratorial intervention and redefinition for their overall thematic effect.

While Romantic novelists are relatively comfortable interrupting their stories to comment on their meaning, naturalist and modern authors typically dissimulate their interventions. Early in La Terre, Zola has Jean read to an attentive rural audience the generalizing saga of “Jacques Bonhomme,” the archetypal peasant, thereby concentrating reader interest on the representative quality of his peasant characters. Other novelists create a “sage” character, an individual whose age and experience has produced sufficient wisdom to help readers understand the thematic value of the other characters’ lives. Sometimes representing the voice of the ages, like old Gisors in Malraux’s Man’s Fate (La Condition humaine), at other times the figure of the sage provides an autobiographical outlet for a thoughtful author (Birkin in Lawrence’s Women in Love). May the gullible reader beware, however, for this technique is eminently susceptible to ironic reversal, as in the case of Gide’s Edouard, whose seeming position as the author’s mouthpiece in The Counterfeiters is constantly undermined by the ridiculous nature of his pompous pronouncements.

Multiplicity as Critique

Historically as well as theoretically, one of the most important products of multiple-focus carnivalization is the creation of multiple-focus texts out of independent single-focus or dual-focus segments that take on a new existence once they have been inserted into a larger context. The multiple-focus nature of Spanish Inn episodes (which often occur in texts otherwise organized according to single-focus principles) depends on the inclusion of numerous independent stories which, told by different individuals, have no apparent unity of plot, theme, or tone. The Renaissance story collection gains its complexity from the multivalence of individual stories. However we may interpret any individual tale in The Decameron or The Heptameron, juxtaposition of that tale to other tales told on the same day (or other tales told by the same storyteller) forces us to build a new interpretive framework, separate from the strategy used for reading individual tales. Half a millennium later, the theoretical writings of nineteenth-century France’s most important novelists (Balzac’s “Avant-propos” to La Comédie humaine, Zola’s treatise on Le Roman expérimental) would insist on a multiple-focus reading of their own, primarily single-focus, novels.

In their wake came two generations of novelists who built their multiple-focus texts out of traditionally narrated adventures of successive generations of the same or related families (Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, Roger Martin du Gard’s Les Thibault, Jules Romains’s Les Hommes de bonne volonté, Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels). In the film world, the tendency to build multiple-focus texts out of narratively unrelated single-focus or dual-focus blocks reached its zenith quite early with D. W. Griffith’s quadripartite Intolerance (1916), parts of which were actually distributed independently as separate films. Today, documentary filmmakers regularly build footage from several different sources, representing multiple individuals, into a single multiple-focus composition.

The possibility of constructing a multiple-focus text out of several single-focus or dual-focus texts reminds us that multiplicity of focus may even be a question solely of the reader’s interests. The chained single-focus tales of a young man and his exemplary father (The Odyssey) or the embedded single-focus treatments of a man and the woman who ruins his life (Madame Bovary) can also be read in multiple-focus terms. The critic who reads Madame Bovary as a portrait of contemporary country life featuring several representative rural figures (a common reading at the turn of the century, when France was still under the spell of naturalism’s multiple-focus tendencies) is simply reading Flaubert’s novel as a multiple-focus text, just as the critic who stresses the portrait of provincial bourgeois life in Pride and Prejudice sacrifices Elizabeth Bennet’s single-focus story to a multiple-focus version of Austen’s novel.

Many texts invite a single-focus or dual-focus reading, only to undermine that reading in favor of a multiple-focus alternative. Victorian fiction offers many novels whose titles apparently promise single-focus fare but whose multihundred pages provide strong justification for multiple-focus reading (e.g., Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Nicholas Nickleby, Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, William Thackeray’s History of Pendennis). Indeed, several critics have suggested that Victorian novels are best understood in terms of a structured relationship between narrow personal accounts and broad panoramas of society, between individual and social explanations of behavior—which is to say, between single-focus and multiple-focus approaches (Eagleton 1976, Garrett 1980, Armstrong 2005). If Tolstoy actively offers an opportunity for dual-focus reading of Russian history (the Napoleon-Alexander approach), as well as multiple separate single-focus readings (focusing on Andrew Bolkónski, Pierre Bezúkhov, Nicholas Rostóv, and especially General Kutúzov), it is only in order to critique them all the more effectively. Similarly, Notre-Dame de Paris and Man’s Fate offer various dual-focus and single-focus lures, the better to hook us eventually on a multiple-focus overview. The same technique is regularly deployed by Italian neorealist filmmakers.

Just as the single-focus mode, both historically and theoretically, operates as an implicit commentary on dual-focus narrative, so multiple-focus texts often critique the single-focus units out of which they typically arise. Positing a dual-focus universe as implied context, single-focus narrative gains its energy from the protagonist’s refusal of conventional values and consequent departure into an unknown world that dual-focus narratives had previously identified with non-being. Single-focus protagonists thus make new meaning out of the very realm that dual-focus tradition treats as meaningless. A similar process takes place in the multiple-focus mode, which—again historically as well as theoretically—operates as a specific critique of the single-focus approach.

In the hands of Chrétien de Troyes, late-twelfth-century romance constitutes one of the first high points of single-focus narrative. Characters like Lancelot and Yvain hold not only our uninterrupted attention but that of the narrator as well. The story appears to depend on the decisions and actions of the individual who remains at the focal point throughout. But Chrétien’s last work, Le roman de Perceval ou le conte du Graal, systematically undermines individual characters’ ability to organize the tale. Even the great Gawain can be unceremoniously dumped with no more than a curt “I don’t feel like talking about his entourage any more, and anyhow the tale stops speaking about him here” (1959:vv. 6213–15). Where Lancelot and Yvain were organized around their title characters and extolled personal qualities, Perceval flits from Perceval to Gawain and back, thoroughly compromising identification and interest. By substantially increasing the number of characters followed, subsequent Grail romances magnify this disdain for individual characters and their qualities. Using interlaced adventures to concentrate attention on such specifically Christian virtues and doctrines as virginity and the celibacy of the priesthood, these romances successfully direct interest away from individual prowess and toward doctrinaire moralism. Knights seeking the Grail can no longer expect to succeed on the basis of their own prowess but must adhere to a new source of power to be found in Christian virtue, which becomes the true subject of the Grail romance.

In many ways, the development of multiple-focus narration in the nineteenth century follows a similar pattern. Under the influence of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, the historical novel—and, on a broader scale, the novel in general—began its nineteenth-century career as a largely single-focus affair. Despite occasional experiments to the contrary, the Romantic worldview remains resolutely individualistic. Only with Thackeray, Tolstoy, and Zola does a single-focus view of history and contemporary social reality give way to a multiple-focus approach aimed specifically at critiquing and replacing the individualism and psychological orientation of the single-focus mode. As in the Grail romances, Tolstoy dwells on individuals identified by their titles (emperor, general, commander) as the heroes of previous narratives. These are characters who may be expected to make and enforce decisions, thereby changing the course of history. Yet the Russian author demonstrates how these very characters are unable to control their own fates, owing both their successes and their failures to forces beyond their power. From this standpoint, Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game) resembles War and Peace to a striking degree. However independent the characters may appear to themselves, however convinced they may be of their ability to control their own fates, however important their individual stories may seem to the construction of the text—our view of multiple couples and classes reveals the extent to which social behavior is in fact controlled by factors beyond the reach of any particular individual.

The public quarrel over interpretation of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir offers an especially pertinent example of multiple-focus ability to contest and invalidate familiar single-focus principles. The changes that Zola made while composing L’Assommoir speak volumes about the inadequacy of single-focus technique for Zola’s naturalist project. Already known for his 1867 single-focus study, Thérèse Raquin, Zola makes quite clear in the 1868 “Notes générales sur la nature de l’oeuvre” that he expects to continue the biographical approach in his Rougon-Macquart series. Citing Stendhal’s single-focus protagonist Julien Sorel as a model, Zola firmly states his intention to build his novels around exceptional individuals (1967c:V,1743). The first novels of the Rougon-Macquart series carry out this plan to the letter. Concentrating on characters like the promiscuous priest of La Faute de l’abbé Mouret or the ambitious politician of Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, Zola was sure to attract public interest while remaining within the bounds of familiar single-focus technique.

For several years, Zola remained insensitive to implicit contradictions between his novelistic technique and his theoretical program. Each novel offers readers the opportunity to follow a single exceptional individual, to experience the world as he or she sees it, to participate in his or her desires and decisions. Though Zola the theoretician expected readers to find a social component in his writing, readers easily concluded that individual decision-making is what makes the world go round. As leader of the naturalists, Zola repeatedly described his novels as engaged critiques of the deleterious effect of various environmental and hereditary defects. Without the narratorial intervention that permits authors like Hugo, Sue, and Eliot to guarantee that their readers will not miss the point, however, Zola found that his novelistic technique did not always lead his readers where he wanted. Not until the summer of 1876 did this theory/practice contradiction come to a head. Chapters 1 through 6 of L’Assommoir had caused an enormous amount of commotion, not just because of Zola’s decision to infuse this working-class novel with less than noble working-class language but also because of the negative judgments that readers understood Zola to be making about his main character, Gervaise Macquart, the provincial girl who falls on rough times in the big city.

Zola set out to write a treatise about the ill effects of alcohol on the working class (“L’Assommoir” is the name of the neighborhood bar, built around a still). What readers saw, however, is the conventional story of a naïve, small-town girl who at first hoists herself up by her bootstraps, taking in washing and saving money until she can afford to open her own laundry, but who then tries to live above her means and subsequently loses everything—shop, apartment, husband, self-respect. Easily read as a personal tragedy, the first half of L’Assommoir was enough to convince many readers that the locus of responsibility for the characters’ personal problems must be sought only in their individual decisions. With only two-thirds of his novel completed, and publication due to resume immediately, Zola was so frustrated by public reaction that in July he ceased writing altogether. By the time he returned to his desk in September, he had solved his compositional crisis and come to terms with his readers’ reactions. During the summer of 1876, Zola learned that single-focus technique was inadequate to his social commentary aspirations and that only multiple-focus presentation could assure the desired reading of his novel.

Responding to Albert Millaud’s public attacks on the novel, on September 9, 1876, Zola outlined the message that he sought to make visible in the completed novel:

If you insist on knowing the lesson which, on its own, will arise from L’Assommoir, I will formulate it in approximately these terms: provide moral instruction for workers, free them from the misery in which they live, fight the crowding and promiscuity of ghettos where the air is thick and foul, and especially wipe out drunkenness, which decimates the working classes by killing the body and the mind. (Zola 1928:49:455)

Implying that the ultimate message of his novel depends on the as yet unpublished final chapters, Zola invites us to take a closer look at the portions of L’Assommoir composed after his July crisis. Careful inspection of the final four chapters suggests a growing desire on Zola’s part to decentralize the novel in order to generalize his message. Far from simply continuing the single-focus form and thematics of the first two-thirds of L’Assommoir, the last part calls into question the conclusions of the first. Not only does it generalize Gervaise’s situation, it also depsychologizes her in order to convince readers that her conduct can be explained only by something other than personal motivation.

Three distinct but related methods help to remove the dénouement of L’Assommoir from the single-focus realm of the psychological. First, Zola diverts the typical psychological novel linear plot, blurring causality, stressing survival and repeated daily action, and eventually molding the plot into something of a cyclical nature. Once Gervaise has returned to Lantier’s bed and thus sealed her doom, the narrative style, like the wallpaper in the laundry, begins to lose its color. The only real events remaining are the deaths of Coupeau and his mother; Gervaise is reduced to “the single pleasure of eating three meals a day” (Zola 1967a:II,642). The imperfect therefore begins to drive out the preterit as dominant tense. Decisions are replaced by accumulations. The whole concept of causality is questioned as events begin to organize themselves in spirals—the progression is there, perhaps, but you have to squint to see it. When Nana first runs away it is an event, a morally reprehensible action that even her parents are quick to condemn. When she disappears again, however, her parents rapidly get used to the new situation. A page later, Nana is back once more, but in less than ten lines she is gone yet again. Then, within two lines, she has flown the coop and straggled back one more time. Now, however, Zola destroys the specificity of the action through use of the imperfect. In the following passage, note how the first three preterits, describing instantaneous action, are transformed into habitual imperfects through the clever transitional device of a preterit designating repeated action (continua):

Elle reçut une rossée, naturellement; puis, elle tomba goulûment sur un morceau de pain dur, et s’endormit, éreintée, avec une dernière bouchée aux dents. Alors, ce train-train continua. Quand la petite se sentait un peu requinquée, elle s’évaporait un matin. Ni vu ni connu! l’oiseau était parti. Et des semaines, des mois s’écoulaient, elle semblait perdue lorsqu’elle reparaissait tout d’un coup, sans jamais dire d’où elle arrivait. (1967a:II,743; my italics)

 

She got a beating, naturally; then she dove into a crust of bread and fell asleep, exhausted, with the last mouthful between her teeth. This routine continued. Whenever she would feel a bit perked up, she would evaporate one morning. Out of sight, out of mind, the bird was gone. Sometimes months would go by, she would seem lost when she suddenly would show up again, never saying where she was coming from.

The linearity of the plot rapidly disappears into passages like this. At the beginning of the novel, Gervaise’s problems were caused by poor decisions, like her insistence that Coupeau convalesce from his fall at home rather than at the hospital; now the narrative is removed from the realm of decisions entirely and transferred instead to time’s dehumanizing tendency to wear people down, both physically and morally.

Second, the degradation of Gervaise and her family is increasingly associated with the parallel problems experienced by others in their milieu, as the following-pattern becomes less rigidly concentrated on Gervaise. One day, when Coupeau claims to have been working, Gervaise decides to ambush him at the pay office, thus assuring her share of the pay. To her surprise, she is not alone, for there are other wives who have the same problem. Even when Gervaise turns to prostitution, seemingly the ultimate degradation, she is but one in a long line of ladies of the night. Is it any wonder that Gervaise learns to excuse her actions by pointing out that she is not alone? Wasn’t it natural for her to go with Lantier? Hadn’t she known him when she was fourteen? And, anyhow, the Rue de la Goutte d’or isn’t so clean itself, with Madame Vigouroux rolling in the coal from dawn to dusk and the grocer’s wife making it with her brother-in-law, not to mention that tight little old watchmaker who carries on with his daughter. Where once Gervaise’s firm decisions differentiated her from her neighbors, now she is made to blend in with those around her, sliding imperceptibly from the exceptional character around whom Zola once planned to build the Rougon-Macquart series to the representative character born of his new swerve toward multiple-focus technique.

Third, traditional notions about individual accountability are challenged, as responsibility for actions is increasingly redirected from the individual toward the group. This change is heralded by a slow but insistent evolution in point of view. During the early parts of the novel we are constantly aware of Gervaise’s projected future, her hopes, her evaluation of the people and activities around her. As the novel progresses, however, our interior views of Gervaise become less frequent and less detailed. A shift in the following-pattern requires Gervaise to share her central spot in the narrative with the other characters, thereby losing the right to our exclusive attention. In addition, the center of Gervaise’s being has moved progressively lower—from heart and mind to bowels and belly. In a parallel development, Zola’s free indirect style deserts Gervaise for a far more generalized point of view. Instead of her thoughts, as Brian Nicholas has pointed out (1962:10), it is the local gossip that we get in free indirect discourse form. With this shift in point of view comes a change in value systems: from a deadline-conscious individualistic work ethic to a nearly atemporal communitarian approach where everyone always has time to sit and chat. Where wrong decisions or defective morals would once have been blamed for characters’ failures, now individual responsibility is replaced by social explanations.

Looking back on his novel shortly after its 1877 publication in book form, Zola once more sought to get the monkey of personal responsibility off his back. Writing to the director of the magazine that had published the first half of the novel, Zola insisted that he had planned every step of his characters’ fall in such a way as “to show that the environment and alcohol are the two great disorganizers, beyond the individual will of the characters.” Gervaise and Coupeau must be seen as passive objects and nothing more. “As for Nana, she is a product. I wanted my drama complete. I needed a good-for-nothing child in the family. She is the daughter of alcoholics, she undergoes the fatality of misery and vice. . . . Consult the statistics, and you’ll see whether I’m lying” (1928:vol. 49, p. 469). Following multiple-focus logic, Zola introduces characters on social and thematic grounds instead of choosing them because of an attractive personality or the importance of the decisions they must make. Nana is necessary in order to broaden the syndrome to yet another generation, thus further refuting the single-focus reading that would make characters fully responsible for their own fate.

“Consult the statistics,” Zola urges, at the dawn of the age of sociology. Zola is here describing his literary technique as well. “I have created and arranged my characters in such a way as to incarnate in them the different varieties of the Parisian worker,” he affirms in the same letter, suggesting that his novel is composed in such a way as to provide the reader-sociologist with all the requisite data for proper analysis. Only with his abandonment of strictly single-focus organization in the final one-third of the novel, however, does Zola’s true purpose become apparent. To emphasize the statistical thematics of sociology, Zola seems to have learned during the Assommoir experience, the novel must become statistical and sociological in its form as well. Only multiple-focus technique could accomplish his thematic purposes. In the years to come, Zola’s most important novels would be built from beginning to end according to multiple-focus principles. Whenever the leader of the naturalist school decided to use the novel as a vessel for so ciological study or social commentary—as in La Terre and Germinal—he would remain faithful to the techniques of multiple-focus narrative.

How Did We Get Here from There?

Discontinuous, fragmented, resisting consistent reader identification, multiple-focus narrative requires a mode of reading different from that of dual-focus and single-focus narrative. From the Grail romances to Victorian novels and from Bruegel to cubism, multiple-focus texts set familiar pieces into unexpected patterns, calling into question the comfortable habits of readers and viewers alike. The multiple-focus romances that dominated Western European narrative from the thirteenth century to the Renaissance offer interesting insights into the new mode of reading required by multiple-focus texts. In single-focus romances, a strict code of conduct specified appropriate forms of action for the romance knight. The knight who refused to lend succor to a damsel in distress could expect castigation on the part of reader and narrator alike. In multiple-focus Grail romances, however, variations from the knightly code of conduct constitute only minor sins, paling before the great fault, the one that returns again and again, from text to text the same. The cardinal sin in the Grail romances involves not the knight’s role as actor in the world but his responsibility to question the world. The knight’s greatest failing is inability to inquire about the unknown, to locate the ineffable: in short, to ask the Grail questions. That this new emphasis on the mystic, the symbolic, and the thematic should accompany a change in narrative technique is no accident, for if multiple-focus narrative exists at all it is in order to ask questions that the two other modes are unable to articulate.

Time and again in multiple-focus texts we find ourselves transported by the narrator from one character to another. We were hearing about Perceval, then suddenly the tale switches to Gawain. We were following Andrew Bolkónski when, with no more warning than a little white space on the page, we find ourselves following Nicholas Rostóv. This hyperbolic modulation invites us regularly to ask, “How did we get here from there?” and thus, implicitly, “What justifies juxtaposition of these particular following-units?” In this way, multiple-focus readers systematically stretch beyond the action-oriented and character-oriented questions of single-focus and dual-focus narrative. Regularly deprived of familiar identification patterns, multiple-focus readers are forced by hyperbolic modulation into positions where they will be encouraged to ask the “Grail” questions, the questions that reach beyond the familiar character and plot surface of the text and into the thematic regions beyond.

One important method of inducing readers to ask questions of a far-reaching nature is to undermine the star system on which single-focus and dual-focus narrative typically repose. However much we may associate the star system with Hollywood, stardom existed long before the moving pictures. Consider the fate of poor Lancelot, legendary romance hero, when his latest adventures were included in the thirteenth-century prose romance, La Queste del Saint Graal. Far from being treated like a star, he is allowed to fall fast asleep when he sees the Holy Grail—a sin that is rapidly tied to his lascivious sexual conduct. Lancelot is used here as sucker bait. We know his reputation as the era’s consummate sex symbol, so we follow him with the interest accorded to a star. His inability to ask the Grail questions, however, transfers our investment from Lancelot to the Grail itself. What is it? What does it mean? What kind of a knight does one have to be in order to ask the right questions? Just as Zola had to downplay Gervaise’s role in order to make a more general point, so the author of La Queste del Saint Graal must abandon Lancelot in order to further his chastity-oriented program, eventually inducing readers to recognize in the Grail an unspoiled vessel symbolizing chastity.

The inability of the star to ask the right questions in the Grail romances is matched in Bruegel’s compositions by an absolute unwillingness to set characters in a hierarchy. Mary and Joseph must wait their turn to be counted just like all the rest. Each proverb and each children’s game is on a level with all the others. Even in the mature large-figure paintings, a system of eye-leading assures democratized attention to all. This refusal to emphasize particular individuals, to create a spatial and narrative center, becomes a basic tenet of twentieth-century multiple-focus narrative. As in the ensemble acting style popularized by the touring Meiningen Players in Germany and André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris, the multiple-focus novel systematically refuses to let a single individual take over the following-pattern. Even with characters who hold an apparently dominant position—like Dorothea Brooke for the first ten chapters of Middlemarch or the novelist Edouard in Gide’s Counterfeiters—the course of circumstances quickly undermines their authority, robbing them of the central position to which they were apparently destined.

A further hindrance to familiar identification patterns may be found in the multiple-focus dependence on intersecting plots. In a typical single-focus scene, we observe numerous characters from a vantage point that is easy for us to discover and occupy. No matter who is speaking or acting, we evaluate each contribution from the standpoint of the protagonist, even during the limited periods when someone else is being followed. Little confusion is likely—except at the start, before a specific individual has been identified as the protagonist (e.g., during the description of the Pension Vauquer at the beginning of Le Père Goriot). Multiple-focus narrative radically revises this configuration. Because the multiple-focus system refuses to take advantage of momentum—treating every new following-unit not as the sanctioned continuation of its predecessor but as an illegitimate child—multiple-focus texts begin again and again. Sometimes they seem made up of nothing but repeated beginnings.

Showing a marked preference for group scenes, often including several characters who have been followed independently, multiple-focus narrative causes significant problems for the reader. When, in book 3 of War and Peace, Nicholas Rostóv lauds the role of the fighting men in the Schön Grabern skirmish, at the same time castigating the staff officers for their inaction, we are hard put to know whether this statement is to be registered as part of young Rostóv’s Bildungsroman (the story of his personal development) or whether it is told as a test for Prince Andrew Bolkónski, who listens imperturbably, refusing to take offense in spite of the opinions that our recent close following of Prince Andrew give us the right to attribute to him. Because we have followed both men separately during Tolstoy’s rendition of the 1805 campaign, we experience the scene between Rostóv and Bolkónski from both sides simultaneously. As readers, we are just as fragmented in our identification tendencies as is Tolstoy’s following-pattern.

What the modernist novel accomplishes through interlaced plots built around a multiple-focus following-pattern, the cinema sometimes achieves through the technique of deep-focus cinematography. Until the late 1930s, film mise-en-scène and editing were heavily indebted to proscenium theater. Important characters were stressed by placing them in sharp focus against a background that, lacking interest and focus, served only to concentrate attention on foreground activity. How different is the system employed by Jean Renoir in La Règle du jeu. Upon their arrival at the country mansion where the bulk of the film’s action takes place, the film’s extremely diverse cast assembles in the entrance hall to welcome the guest of honor, André Jurieu, a Lindbergh look-alike who has just flown the Atlantic solo, only to be snubbed by the countess for whom he all too publicly undertook his exploit. As the camera focuses on the countess attempting to explain (away) her part in the aviator’s flight, we note two other faces, perfectly in focus even though they are not located in the foreground: the countess’s husband and her friend Octave (Jurieu’s other rival for the countess’s affection). In a single shot, Renoir brings together four separate lines, combining an extraordinary economy of expression with a complex invitation to multiple viewings, for only the most experienced viewer will succeed in seeing all four characters at once on first viewing. Most spectators will focus on one character one time and another the next, thus multiplying the possible permutations of the following-pattern without varying the basic multiple-focus system.

Later in the same film, we find deep-focus technique serving another common multiple-focus function. While the masters have been squabbling over the mistress, the servants have been fighting over her maid. One of the evident tasks of this film is to reduce diverse classes to a single, human, common denominator. Throughout the film, we have been alternating between the classes and the sexes. Only when the interlaced paths cross, in a series of deep-focus shots that always give us more than one squabbling trio at a time, are we forced to consider one plot in terms of the other, one following-unit in terms of another. Since the paths of Jurieu, the count, and the countess constantly cross the paths of Schumacher the game warden, Marceau the poacher, and Lise the countess’s maid, it becomes harder and harder for the spectator to avoid asking the Grail questions about these two trios. Who are they? What do they represent? Why are we constantly seeing them together? Why do they keep doing similar things?

William Wyler’s postwar masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives also uses deep-focus cinematography to force comparisons among the three interlaced plots around which the film is built. Unrelated by anything but the coincidence that brought them home in the same airplane, three diverse servicemen are followed separately and apparently independently. Halfway through the film they run into each other at Butch’s Place, where Gregg Toland’s extraordinary camera work juxtaposes them in a single image. The three will not be seen together again until the final scene, where Toland once again deploys the resources of deep-focus cinematography to connect them. While one serviceman’s marriage occupies the foreground, a deep-focus image reveals the other two in the background. The Grail questions cannot be avoided: Why these three? What do they have in common? What is it that brings them together here in this image, this story?

Hem-Naming

Single-focus and dual-focus narratives encourage readers to ask questions located at the level of the narrative. The answers to these questions are also located at the level of the narrative. Question: What will happen to Jesus? Answer: He dies and is resurrected. Question: With whom will Fred be paired? Answer: With Ginger. The Grail questions induced by multiple-focus texts always extend beyond the level of the narrative, however. They call for answers that cannot be furnished by narrative action alone. The narrator’s own commentary may provide the requisite answers, extending, as it often does, far beyond the events of the narrative itself. More often, however, readers themselves must postulate and inhabit a level beyond that of narrative action in order to satisfy their multiple-focus desires.

To make sense, the separate parts of multiple-focus texts must be made to signify in similar terms. At first, Malraux’s Man’s Fate appears to be only a disjointed account of revolutionary activity. It begins to develop the thematic resolution characteristic of multiple-focus narrative only when the common humanity of the various participants comes to the fore, only when each of the activities presented can be fitted into a thematic framework common to all the actors. Compilation of the multiple stories of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance into a single film appears unjustified until their common thematic basis becomes evident. Just as the individual characters of Bruegel’s drawing Elck lack a reason for being brought together in this particular composition until the engraving inscribes the same name—Everyman—on the hem of each one’s garment, so all characters and activities must go through a process of hem-naming in order to fulfill the promise of multiple-focus texts. Often, the hem name is immediately provided by the work’s title. Think, for example of the multiple-focus effect achieved from the very start by the choice of titles like “Children’s Games,” “The Counterfeiters,” “The Human Condition,” or even “The Big Calves” (Fellini’s early film I Vitelloni, the story of five overgrown children, each failing to find a meaning in life).

Just as the interlacing of Grail romances forces attention away from simple questions of knightly prowess and toward the more ethereal question of Christian virtue, so multiple-focus texts regularly employ the technique of juxtaposition to transcend their lowly materials. Nowhere has this process been more precisely described than in the considerable literature surrounding the cubist movement in art and poetry. As the poet Guillaume Apollinaire says in his 1913 essay on cubist painters: “What separates cubism from all previous painting is that cubism is not an art of imitation but an art of conception” (1965:56). The montage strategy of cubism, like the interlace approach of multiple-focus literature, strives to reach beyond visual perception and narrative resolution. Early-twentieth-century avant-garde artists refused to be satisfied with a specific view of an object, instead replacing vision with conception as the artist’s fundamental mode. The artist does not paint an object itself but instead suggests that object in “all its essentials, even those hidden by optical perspective,” as Paul Klee put it in 1902(1945:443). “In order to achieve maximum strength,” asserted the poet Pierre Reverdy a quarter-century later, “an image must grow out of the spontaneous juxtaposition of two extremely diverse objects whose connection can be seized by the mind alone” (1927:34; his italics). Art must force us to step beyond familiar methods of perceiving the world. “If the senses totally approve the image,” says Reverdy in the same passage, “they kill it for the mind.” Our uneasiness with cubist works is thus accounted for and valorized: only by frustrating the senses can a work of art force lazy consumers to become active participants, thus freeing them to discover new relationships, new realms.

No longer able to count on vision as a unique method of knowing, the spectator, like the artist, must develop a new type of understanding, such as that recommended in 1912 by Maurice Raynal, one of the most important early theorists of cubism:

We never, in fact, see an object in all its dimensions at once. Therefore what has to be done is to fill in a gap in our seeing. Conception gives us this means. Conception makes us aware of objects we would not be able to see. “I cannot see a chiliagon [a 1,000-sided figure],” said Bossuet, “but I can conceive it perfectly well.” When I think of a book, I do not perceive it in any particular dimension but in all of them at once. And so, if the painter succeeds in rendering the object in all its dimensions, he achieves a work of method which is of a higher order than one painted according to the visual dimensions only. (Raynal 1966:95)

Like multiple-focus literary narratives, cubism constitutes not only an alternative to previous approaches but also a specific critique of their ground for being. As Raynal succinctly states, “In painting, if one wishes to approach truth, one must concentrate only on the conceptions of the objects, for these alone are created without the aid of those inexhaustible sources of error, the senses” (96). For the cubist, the senses exist only to provide material for conceptual activity (just as multiple-focus literature uses single-focus or dual-focus passages as a means of leading the reader past identification to the questioning activity particular to multiple-focus narrative).

How early-twentieth-century art movements sought to achieve the conceptualization of art is admirably explained by Gino Severini in his “Futurist Manifesto 1913.” Insisting throughout that a painting’s “subject matter, when its effect is considered, sacrifices its integrity, and therefore its integral quantities, in order to develop to the utmost its qualitative continuities” (1973:123), Severini offers a specific example of a particular “qualitative continuity”:

In this way certain forms and colours expressing the sensations of noise, sound, smell, heat, speed, etc., connected with the experience of an ocean liner, can express by plastic analogy the same sensations evoked in us by a very different reality—the Galeries Lafayette [a prominent Paris department store].

The experience ocean liner is thus linked to the experience Galeries Lafayette (and every experience is linked to its specific but diverse correlative) by its qualitative radiations which permeate the universe on the electrical waves of our sensibility.

This is a complex form of realism which totally destroys the integrity of the subject-matter—henceforth taken by us only at its greatest vitality, which can be expressed thus:

Galeries Lafayette = ocean liner

The abstract colours and forms that we portray belong to the Universe outside time and space. (121–22)

If dual-focus narrative models space and single-focus texts develop in time, the multiple-focus form seeks out the tertium quid of conception. This it does by juxtaposing objects, characters, or narrative segments that possess what Severini calls the same “qualitative radiations.” What would be the subject of a painting in which the Galeries Lafayette and an ocean liner are placed side by side? To be sure, neither the ocean liner nor the Galeries Lafayette. Instead, it is the shared qualities of the two objects that garner our attention, that provide the ultimate answer to our inevitable question: “How did we get here from there?”

While futurists were setting department stores next to ocean liners, while cubists and surrealists were heeding the call by Isidore Lucien Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont) to juxtapose an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table, while Sergei Eisenstein was developing his theories of montage, D. H. Lawrence was interweaving the stories of four characters in Women in Love. Instead of perpetuating familiar single-focus strategies, Lawrence’s novel—like many other symbolic novels of the same period—is less interested in characters than in states. Anxious to define certain basic concepts like being and existence, Lawrence has his characters enact themes rather than make choices, thereby compromising character individuality. Because the story must be put to conceptual purposes, narrative exists only to be superseded. Updating the Grail romances like so many other modern multiple-focus novels, Women in Love challenges the reader to reestablish the secret connections among Birkin, Ursula, Gerald, and Gudrun. Yet Birkin insists that no common ground can possibly justify comparing one person to another: “One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison” (1960:97). As the novel weaves on, however, Birkin and friends continually provide us with the very terms of comparison whose existence he has denied, so we are hardly surprised to hear Birkin affirm that there are only “two great ideas, two great streams of activity remaining” (296).

According to Lawrence’s spokesman, all people act and react “involuntarily according to a few great laws” (296). The highly charged language with which Lawrence typically infuses his writing has already revealed the secret of those two great laws: on the one side, the sensual, proud, and electric; on the other, the sensuous, conceited, and mechanical. Again and again, Gerald is identified with industrial mechanisms, to the point where Lawrence terms him “the God of the machine” (220), while the relationship between Ursula and Birkin brings to them “a rich new circuit, a new current of passional electric energy” (305), a source of power that is “deeper, further in mystery than the phallic source” (306). “Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad” (viii), says Lawrence in the preface to Women in Love. Indeed, the entire book appears as an attempt to create a space for the author’s beloved passional soul. Like La Queste del Saint Graal, which uses the mystic notion of the Holy Grail to champion male virginity, so Lawrence attempts to reach beyond accepted social practices toward a mystic state that can only be hinted at, that can be suggested only by the indirect methods of multiple-focus narrative.

To induce readers to discover the common denominators necessary to make sense of multiple-focus characters and plots, particularly good use has been made of narratorial intervention, parallel scenes between otherwise unrelated characters, and narrative metaphor. Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris is one of the earliest and most successful of nineteenth-century serial novels combining dual-focus and multiple-focus techniques. Modulating back and forth from Rodolphe and his angelic legion of do-gooders on the one side to La Chouette, Bras-Rouge, Jacques Ferrand, and their criminal comrades on the other, Les Mystères de Paris also provides a constant interlace of seemingly unrelated plot motifs, all of which ineluctably cross at the high points of the narrative. In between, we are regularly privy to Sue’s reflections on his narrative strategies. Three-quarters of the way through the novel, for example, Sue chooses to give us a close look at the menagerie of inmates condemned to do time in La Force prison. Because this interlude contributes nothing to the book’s dominant dual-focus narrative, hardly touching on the story’s main characters, Sue provides an explanation of his strategy:

I may perhaps then be excused for having grouped around the prisoners who are already well-known characters in this story a number of secondary characters, designed to activate, to give relief to certain critical ideas, and to complete this initiation into prison life. (1963:679)

Like Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Sue turns to narratorial intervention to make sure that his interlaced tale will be understood on his terms—in this case, the terms of a social reformer more interested in the common causes of his characters’ misery than in the specificity of their individual destinies.

In their concern to guarantee that separate characters will be understood according to the same general parameters, multiple-focus authors regularly create parallels tying one character to another. Take, for example, the voyeuristic tendencies of the Frollo family in Notre-Dame de Paris. Jealous to the point of homicide, older brother Claude secretly watches the young dandy Phoebus make love to the gypsy princess Esmeralda until he can stand it no longer. Shortly afterward, younger brother Jehan hides under a table and observes while Claude debates the principles of alchemy with other philosophers. The shared voyeuristic position of the Frollo brothers in these two scenes serves to bind permanently together the two master plots of Hugo’s novel—alchemy and love. Parallel scenes like these encourage readers to resolve differences between characters at a higher level of generalization. Instead of experiencing a novel as separate interlaced stories of characters connected only by chance meetings or plot wrinkles, we begin to reformulate the text as a coherent landscape, unified by the hem-naming process.

Consider the efffect of the following parallels (chosen among many) on War and Peace:

• Pierre Bezúkhov believes that everyone sees him falling in love with Hélène, just as Nicholas Rostóv is sure that everybody can see his fear upon entering a battle.
• The dissolution of Andrew Bolkónski’s marriage is timed to correspond with the celebration of Pierre’s marriage.
• While Borís is openly attempting to profit from the social advantages of military rank, Pierre consciously puts Masonic brotherhood above social status.
• To Pierre’s Masonic conversion corresponds Andrew’s newfound communion with nature and his decision to modernize his serfs.

 

In addition, nearly every character is characterized according to his or her particular belief in a different version of the notion of fate: Mary Bolkónski in providence, Pierre Bezúkhov in a Masonic God, Andrew Bolkónski in nature, Nicholas Rostóv in Alexander, and so forth. While Tolstoy is not one to hammer home the social or symbolic import of his parallels, like Sue, Hugo, and the author of La Queste del Saint Graal, these parallels nevertheless pull us out of straightforward character or plot concerns and launch us into a realm more commonly inhabited by narratorial intervention—a world of questions and answers that lie beyond the limits of the narrative as such.

A similar process presides over the organization of many Victorian novels. Combining multiple plot lines, they must deploy many different devices to bring the various parts of the novel together, both globally and locally. George Eliot’s enormous Middlemarch offers a particularly clear example of this process. Based on two originally separate projects (a story about Dorothea Brooke and a study of provincial life), Eliot’s novel reflects in its structure this combination of single-focus and multiple-focus origins. Beginning with ten chapters about Dorothea, Middlemarch eventually spins out to a much broader following-pattern involving many different characters. Underlying the novel’s at times apparently random organization are several important parallels. As Peter Garrett points out:

[Eliot’s decision to join the two projects] seems to have arisen from a recognition of similarities between Dorothea and Lydgate, and the reader reenacts this perception as he compares these two stories of idealistic aspirations frustrated by social restrictions and mistaken marriages. From Book 2 onward, we are prompted to pursue this kind of reading by book titles that direct us to compare “Three Love Problems” or “Two Temptations” and to find multiple applications for rubrics such as “Old and Young” or “The Dead Hand.” (1980:142)

Though Middlemarch may be one of the novels excoriated by Henry James as a “large loose baggy monster” (1934:84), it clearly offers many principles of unification across an extremely diverse following-pattern.

One of the most interesting and successful of multiple-focus hem-naming techniques involves the use of metaphor to establish connections between realms once deemed separate or whose relationship was not previously obvious. Shuttling between military scenes and views of daily life away from the front, War and Peace confects a common language to bring the two domains together, repeatedly using battlefield metaphors to describe the salon and images of the hunt to describe battle scenes. Attributing to his military characters emotions normally encountered in the boudoir, Tolstoy also develops extended parallels between social and military hierarchies. Though the cast of War and Peace is large and varied, our ability to detect hidden connections among the characters helps provide unity to Tolstoy’s novel. Similar methods are used by Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris. Through the ever-present spider/ fly metaphor, with its graphic extension into the domain of webs and concentric circles, every character is defined by reference to the problem of fate. In Nostromo, Joseph Conrad brings together the cast of thousands through a pattern of symbols built around the silver of the mine (Schwartz 1994:704–5).

Realm-tying metaphors are especially popular among authors concerned to avoid overt narratorial intervention. Malraux never editorializes about the unifying principle of Man’s Fate, leaving that task instead to his opium-smoking sage, Gisors:

“It is very rare for a man to be able to put up with—how shall I say?—his human condition . . .”

He thought of one of Kyo’s ideas: whatever cause men are willing to die for tends, however confusedly, to justify this condition by lending it dignity: Christianity for the slave, nation for the citizen, communism for the worker. [ . . . ]

“Intoxication is the rule for everyone: this country has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has women . . . Maybe love is the main means that Westerners use to free themselves from their human condition . . .”

Beneath these words flowed a murky counter-current of half-hidden figures: Tchen and murder, Clappique and his craziness, Katow and the revolution, May and love, himself and opium . . . Only Kyo seemed to him to resist these domains. (1946:185)

Providing us with a single parameter according to which all the characters may be understood—the way in which they give sense to or escape their humanity—Gisors offers a fully conceptual manner of integrating the various following-units of Malraux’s classic.

At the same time, the book’s figurative language concretizes Gisor’s interpretation. “To submit, for a woman,” claims Ferral, “to possess, for a man, are the only two methods of understanding available to human beings” (98). Accordingly, the one action that each character values above all others is treated as his or her sex act. Tchen reaches heights of ecstasy only when contemplating his own death (123); not surprisingly, he labels those who have not yet committed murder “virgins” (50). He refuses to leave the suicide-murder of Chiang-Kai-Shek to anyone else, “because I don’t like the women I love to be screwed by others” (124). We are told that Clappique embraces gambling as one might a prostitute (193–98). Kyo’s woman is the revolution itself. Now nine months pregnant, “she would either give birth or die” (121). As for Ferral, “he never slept with anyone but himself, but his narcissism depended on his not being alone” (188). Character after character submits to the same metaphor, thereby revealing his or her particular response to the challenge of the human condition.

The champion of the realm-tying metaphor is certainly Émile Zola, whose naturalist theories forced him to forego the intervention of a strong narrator like that employed by Tolstoy and Hugo. The way Zola uses figurative language in La Terre, for example, is quite instructive. From the very first chapter, in which Françoise helps a bull to mount her cow, La Terre is the story of sexual coupling, not only among farm animals but also within the other realms that characterize the novel’s rural universe. The farm world is systematically defined by a mythic identification between the sowing of seeds and “coitus with the earth,” as Zola so indelicately puts it. The business world is largely restricted to the extended treatment afforded to the Charles family brothel. Family life is reduced to “la culbute” (“taking a tumble”), a deliciously ambiguous term that Zola sometimes uses to evoke sexual pleasure and at other times deploys to refer to death. Relationships between generations, between male and female, client and proprietor, farmer and earth are all brought back to the same basic verity, the same fundamental human activity. Sex, eating, and other simple pastimes are regularly employed as metaphors to link a broad spectrum of activities. More than any other novelist, perhaps, Zola knows how to make grist for his multiple-focus mill through the use of a single master metaphor.

Zola is also adept at combining metaphorical language with his characters’ actions in order to link various realms and characters. When every imaginable sort of power is redefined in terms of Germinal’s eating metaphor, a relatively static product results. The book becomes almost allegorical in its tendency to reduce all activity to the same hem name. Contrast to that process the description of old man Fouan’s kids at the beginning of La Terre, as they dicker to lower the pension they will owe their father. The children bargain, Zola tells us, “with the bad faith of peasants buying a pig” (1967b:28). This early in the novel, the pig comparison passes for a simple descriptive device. Zola makes us wait some 140 pages to discover the full meaning of the metaphor, as Fouan’s son actually dickers for a pig. Instead of exhausting itself in its first, descriptive, use, the metaphor takes on a second life, reversing its field, as it were. Now the process of buying a pig seems colored by the previous metaphor. Peasants buy pigs, this reversal implies, with the bad faith of greedy children out to cheat their aged parents.

Right in the middle of the pig-bargaining process, a similar scene involving a cow gives further life to the dickering metaphor. Just as he had driven a hard bargain for the pig, so Buteau drives the price down on the cow that Lise covets. As Zola makes abundantly clear, this bargaining scene constitutes a displaced form of courtship, a fact recalled later when Buteau courts Lise “as if he were still bargaining for the cow” (172). To no one’s surprise, the new wife gives birth at the same time as the new cow (243–56), for in the mythic world of Zola’s master metaphors, the two females are one and the same. Every possible peasant activity is seen as a function of every other activity, for the subject of the novel is not any individual destiny but the effects of the Earth itself on the people that inhabit it.

Intentional Accidents

Because hyperbolic modulation repeatedly induces multiple-focus readers to ask “How did we get here from there?,” the process of hem-naming that provides each text’s thematic resolution often dwells on questions of causality. Is the movement from one narrative segment to another dictated by tradition, by chance, or by design? Is the flow of the text caused by narrator decisions or by character actions? Why do things happen as they do? And why are they reported in this particular manner? Replete with chance meetings, multiple explanations of single incidents, and reflections on the reasons for historical events, multiple-focus texts challenge readers to rethink familiar notions of causality. Victor Hugo announces ceremoniously in the preface to Notre-Dame de Paris that his book is about fate. Leo Tolstoy peppers War and Peace with divergent explanations of the failure of Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Thornton Wilder sandwiches The Bridge of San Luis Rey between chapters titled “Perhaps an Accident” and “Perhaps an Intention.” Multiple-focus narrative cries out for special attention to questions of causality.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey explains one chance meeting with another. The collapse of the great bridge brings death to five people crossing it by chance. “Why did this happen to those five,” the author asks. Presented as an answer to that simple question, Wilder’s book is organized as a series of single-focus sections. Following, in turn, each of the characters who died, moving from one to another through the familiar expedient of chapter divisions, we develop a sense of the compartmentalized nature of their lives, which seem so totally separate that we do indeed wonder why a similar fate was reserved for these particular characters. Soon, a plan begins to emerge. While the paths of the main characters never cross until they plunge to their deaths together, we learn that their lives centered around two characters who did not die on the bridge—a talented but faithless singer, the Perichole, and a nun with the heart of a loving mother, Madre María del Pilar. Not until the very end of the novel do we learn that the lives of these two characters have crossed, that the Perichole has been so touched by the death of her loved ones and the fact that she alone was saved, that she has begun to work for the poor and the sick in Madre María’s convent. This encounter, which at an earlier point in the novel might have seemed solely the result of chance, is explained by Madre María in totally different terms. “Learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace,” she says of the fall of the bridge (Wilder 1927:231).

The search for a hidden pattern to explain seemingly random occurrences dominates many a multiple-focus text. John Hersey’s Hiroshima adopts many of Wilder’s strategies. Beginning with the introduction of six people who survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, the author immediately invites speculation in a manner reminiscent of The Bridge of San Luis Rey: “A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died” (Hersey 1946:4). Writing two decades after Wilder, Hersey increases the compartmentalization of his characters by narrating still shorter segments of their lives—one after the other, always in the same order, always with the same coldness of observation. When the paths of three of the six characters meet in Asano Park, however, we sense a change. Up to this point we have experienced each of the stories as a separate single-focus tale. Now that the interlaced accounts have crossed, it is the relationships among the characters that come to the fore. As the effects of the bomb slowly wear off, we wonder how Hersey will exploit these relationships and whether they will eventually lend meaning to this modern disaster. In February 1946, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, still infected and despondent, is visited by one of her fellow survivors, Father Kleinsorge. In one of the book’s very few direct-address passages, she recalls the theme evoked at the outset:

She asked bluntly, “If your God is so good and kind, how can he let people suffer like this?” She made a gesture which took in her shrunken leg, the other patients in her room, and Hiroshima as a whole. “My child,” Father Kleinsorge said, “man is not now in the condition God intended. He has fallen from grace through sin.” And he went on to explain all the reasons for everything. (1946:109)

Not all readers will be reassured by Father Kleinsorge’s explanation of “all the reasons for everything,” but for Miss Sasaki, his explanation brings new strength, a rapid cure, and an eventual conversion to Catholicism. Here, as in Bridge, order can be detected behind the chaos of life, proving that even the most horrible disasters are truly acts of God.

What difference does it make that Wilder and Hersey chose a multiple-focus approach? On the surface of things, a single-focus approach would appear more appropriate. Wilder could have followed the Perichole throughout her eventful life, ending with the typical single-focus conclusion of conversion. Hersey could have concentrated on the story of Toshiko Sasaki, following her from sin and the bomb to cure and conversion. The problem with these solutions is that they lay overmuch emphasis on individual action, always a potential single-focus trap. Casting a story in the single-focus mold tends to concentrate attention on the protagonist’s choices and on the individual attitudes and decisions underlying them. Whether the pattern chosen is sin and repentance, a change in goals, or finding oneself, single-focus concentration on the protagonist tends to dissimulate the role of the agent of change—even when that agent is the very hand of God.

To undermine familiar single-focus causal explanations, multiple-focus authors regularly offer a variety of possible causes. In the preface to Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo concentrates our attention on causal concerns by telling us that his book is about fate—in capital letters and written in Greek, if you please. The novel’s very first scene takes place in the Palais de Justice, which, as Hugo explains, is described only because it no longer existed in 1831. Having been burned down earlier, it was thus unknown to the reader. Why was it burned down? That depends on whether you prefer (a) a historical explanation, passing through Ravaillac’s assassination of Henri IV; (b) an astronomical approach, replete with falling star; or (c) the verse-maker’s theory:

dame Justice,		lady Justice
Pour avoir mangé trop d’épice,		Having eaten too much spice,
Se mit tout le palais en feu.		Lit the entire palace on fire.

Whatever we may think of this triple explanation—“political, physical, poetic”—we understand that it is the fire of 1618 that has forced the author to describe the Palais de Justice. “Which proves this novel truth,” opines Hugo, “that great events cause unexpected results” (1963:244).

As we move through Hugo’s novel, we are constantly subjected to unexpected and seemingly arbitrary comments on causal concerns. We would hardly expect the common activity of following a character to elicit philosophical commentary, yet Pierre Gringoire’s decision to follow the young gypsy girl Esmeralda through the streets of Paris is treated as “a voluntary abdication of his free will” and as “a mixture of devil-may-care independence and blind obedience, a sort of intermediary between slavery and freedom” (265). Nearly every occurrence is redefined in terms of its possible causes. The pitiful recluse Gudule, for example, has concluded from the fact that gypsies stole her baby that all gypsies are dangerous. The reader follows another line of reasoning, concluding that if Gudule’s daughter was carried off sixteen years ago by a band of gypsies she must now be a girl in her late teens and probably thought to be a gypsy herself. Gudule’s mistaken hypothesis is proven wrong only when she is finally united with her daughter. This reunion becomes, in turn, a new link in the chain of causality, for Esmeralda was convinced that she would eventually find her mother only if she retained her purity, and she has preserved that only at the expense of the freedom offered to her by Claude Frollo. She retains her purity, therefore she finds her mother. “But is such a story believable?” asks Gudule ironically, drawing our attention once again to the ridiculousness of what human beings call “causes.”

Again and again, Hugo presses the reader to concentrate on problems of causality. One day, by “coincidence,” Claude Frollo leans on a manuscript of Honorius of Autun’s De Praedestinatione et liber arbitrio, while he reads his only printed book, Glossa in epistolas D. Pauli. The irony of the juxtaposition of these two books is clear only when we remember the central doctrine enunciated in Paul’s letters—that of the paradoxical “freedom through bondage”—the same type of freedom acted out by Pierre Gringoire as he followed Esmeralda through the streets many pages earlier. Causal paradoxes remain part of Hugo’s arsenal throughout Notre-Dame de Paris. When Jacques Charmolue raises his hand to save a fly attacked by a spider, Claude Frollo tells him to “let fate have its way” (Hugo 1963:336). The irony of the mysterious priest’s notion of fate, which can succeed only with his help, is apparent to all but Claude. Later playing the part of the spider, Claude holds Esmeralda in his clutches. Finally trapped in his web, “she sensed that destiny is an irresistible force” (401). And yet she resists him, foiling destiny and forcing Claude to redefine his notion of fate. We think we understand the workings of destiny, yet Hugo’s paradoxes serve to convince us that fate is beyond the grasp of a single human being. This kind of philosophical equivocation, where fate is redefined to fit the situation, remains a favorite motif of multiple-focus authors.

In Lafcadio’s Adventures, André Gide attributes precisely the same kind of inside-out reasoning to Lafcadio, who prefers to let the roll of a die determine his actions: “‘If I roll a six,’ he said to himself as he pulled out the die, ‘I’ll get off the train!’ He rolled a five. ‘I’ll get off anyway’” (1958a:831). When Lafcadio turns to pick up his suitcase, however, it has disappeared; he finally spots it being carried away, but when he tries to give chase he is stopped by the sight of Amédée’s jacket. “Too bad for the suitcase!” he decides. “The die spelled it out: I shouldn’t get off here” (832). Is Lafcadio remaining on the train out of obedience to the roll of the die? because of his own free will? or because of the presence of Amédée’s jacket, a reminder of the murder he has just committed? We are not meant to know, but we do realize that Lafcadio has no more idea of what it is to commit an act without motivation than Brother Juniper does of the reasons for the fall of the Bridge of San Luis Rey, in which he thought he saw both “the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven” (Wilder 1927:219).

In Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo establishes a multiple-focus tradition by using court decisions to further concentrate attention on problems of causality. First we see Quasimodo’s trial for having attempted to abduct Esmeralda. When the hunchback is punished, he assumes it is for having committed a crime, “which when you come right down to it was hardly the case, since he was punished only for being deaf and for having been sentenced by a deaf judge” (1963:320). Shortly afterward, Esmeralda is accused of resorting to sorcery in the near-fatal stabbing of her lover Phoebus. The ultimate proof of this contention is that a dry leaf has been substituted for the gold coin with which Phoebus paid for the room where he was stabbed, but we have seen that a flesh-and-blood boy actually made the substitution. In spite of such “conclusive” proof, Esmeralda refuses to confess her alleged crime until she is subjected to the limb-tearing torture of the rack, where the innocent girl finally admits her “guilt.” “Justice has finally been done!” says Jacques Charmolue, this time perfectly happy to see the fly crushed (345). All that remains is for the local gossips to try the poor gypsy girl: “‘Say there, is it true that she refused a confessor?’ ‘That’s what they say.’ ‘I told you she was a pagan!’” (358). Had the multiple-focus following-pattern not permitted us to see the scene in which Claude Frollo tries to seduce Esmeralda under the guise of confessing her, we could not understand the irony and horror of the gossips’ syllogism.

The events leading to Esmeralda’s death demonstrate the impossibility of isolating individual causes. She is condemned to death for killing a man who did not die and whom she loved; he was stabbed only because he had to borrow money from Claude Frollo to pay for a room. The gypsy girl is at first saved by Quasimodo, whom she fears, but the hunchback thinks that the vagrants who come to help her want to harm her. The king thinks that the beggars are angry because Esmeralda has not yet been hanged, but he is sick and so decides to have both the girl and the vagrants hanged. Claude Frollo and Pierre Gringoire save Esmeralda, but because she refuses to satisfy his desires Pierre leaves her with Claude, who has no more success with her than Pierre, and so leaves her with Gudule. Gudule is her mother, but she is powerless to save the hidden Esmeralda when she cries out to the passing Phoebus, the one whose “death” began this merry-go-round. In the end we see Esmeralda trapped by her love. She dies not, as we expect, because of those who hate her but in spite of them.

The case of Esmeralda is like that of the legendary battle: for want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, for want of a horse a rider was lost, for want of a rider a battle was lost, for want of a battle the war was lost. One approach to multiple-focus narration involves following, in turn, the negligent blacksmith, the inobservant stableboy, the unsuspecting rider, and his surprised commander in order to end up with the opposing king, whose conclusion that the war was won by his superior strategy only we can properly judge. Multiple-focus narration is the form of the little people, the insignificant individuals whose role can be appreciated only when their combined contributions are allowed to outweigh that of the king, emperor, or general. The simple national and individual explanations of dual-focus and single-focus writing are rejected in favor of a more complex view of the causes underlying events.

Without a full view of every link in the causal chain, the final event either looks like a coincidence or is apparently explained by what turn out to be mistaken interpretations. Thus Edouard, Gide’s novelist in The Counterfeiters, is baffled by the death of little Boris and refuses to insert it into his novel on the grounds that it “lacks sufficient motivation” (1958b:1246). The reader, however, enjoys a privileged position that even Edouard, with his novelist’s eye, does not share. Because we have followed all the characters, we are able to piece together the whole story, from nail and horse to rider and battle. We eventually note the inadequacy of Madame Sophroniska’s Freudian approach (the quintessential single-focus explanatory principle) to explain Boris’s basic instability. His final action results from a normal desire to belong and is not at all a suicide, as Edouard assumes.

Throughout The Counterfeiters our privileged position has been brought home to us by the special emphasis placed on characters who manage to combine the information of a number of other characters. After Bernard has heard Olivier’s story about Vincent, and read Edouard’s journal entry about Laura, he senses that he is the only one to have combined the two stories—along with the reader, of course. The same overview is apparently achieved by Pauline Molinier when her own suspicions are added to her husband’s hunches about certain stolen letters. This time, however, we have known for quite a while that her son Georges took the letters. We learn now, if we had not realized it previously, that we readers and not Edouard are the omniscient ones. We alone can draw conclusions based on observation of a given event from several different points of view. The reader is the only one who can attribute a cause to Boris’s death, the seemingly unmotivated event that closes Gide’s novel, but which Edouard refuses to include in his.

Making sense of a seemingly unmotivated act is also the task allotted to readers of Gide’s other long narrative, Lafcadio’s Adventures. The first character followed in this bizarre work (which Gide refused to characterize as a novel) is Anthime Armand-Dubois, Freemason, and one of the stock types of multiple-focus fiction. Like his brother-in-law Julius, like Edouard in The Counterfeiters, like Claude Frollo in Notre-Dame de Paris, Anthime is a scientist confronted by facts that cannot be explained by his system. If he turns from cruel experimentation to devout prayer, it is because he has been forced to revise his opinions about causality. At the end of book 1, however, we leave Anthime. As so often happens in multiple-focus works, the seeming arbitrariness of interlaced narration leads us to wonder whether there isn’t a hidden principle at work. Our questioning is only reinforced by Lafcadio’s surprise murder of Amédée. This much-publicized “gratuitous act,” along with Lafcadio’s reflections, continues to focus our attention on questions of causality, even after Protos has mistakenly been incarcerated for Lafcadio’s crime.

Single-focus crimes are typically solved by reconstruction of the criminal’s motivation. Lafcadio’s act is an exemplary multiple-focus crime because it lacks the kind of motivation typically associated with single-focus narrative. To the reader privy to Lafcadio’s every thought and action, numerous indirect “motivations” appear. To Lafcadio, however, his act appears totally gratuitous, according to “that psychological law,” formulated by Tolstoy apropos of War and Peace, “which compels a man who commits actions under the greatest compulsion, to supply in his imagination a whole series of retrospective reflections to prove his freedom to himself” (1966:1374). As in The Counterfeiters, only we readers are in a position to connect the book’s many events. We are the only ones who understand the strange series of events that place Amédée and Lafcadio in the same railway car and who know Lafcadio’s past well enough to realize what bizarre effects Lafcadio’s various “uncles” (particularly Wladi, of whom he has just been dreaming) have had on him. If the gratuity of Lafcadio’s act remains uncertain, however, one thing is sure: we cannot sojourn long in Gide’s multiple-focus universe without concentrating our interpretive energy on questions of causality.

The same is true—in spades—of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Again and again, in short paragraphs or chapter-long commentary, the Russian master focuses our attention on causal concerns. He does so to undermine the very notion of causality, in the traditional single-focus sense of the term. For Tolstoy, causal explanations depend for their validity on the free will of the individuals acting; yet, as he shows through repeated analyses, the characters of history are deluded in asserting their own free will: “It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws” (1966:1351). As Tolstoy asserts in the novel’s final words, it is necessary “to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious” (1351).

How closely this conclusion is tied to the choice of multiple-focus technique we can see from the numerous metaphors that Tolstoy draws from the science of mechanics. To undermine the notion of a soldier’s free will, for example, Tolstoy offers the following logic: “If many simultaneously and variously directed forces act on a given body, the direction of its motion cannot coincide with any one of those forces, but will always be a mean—what in mechanics is represented by the diagonal of a parallelogram of forces” (1109). In other words, if we want to know why an action happened in a particular way, we cannot concentrate only on the apparent agent of the action, for the action is in fact not initiated by that individual. Nor, for that matter, can we expect to find a single direct line of actions leading up to and causing the one in question, for motion is caused by a multitude of forces, whose vectors must be known and combined for the resultant motion to be understood. What Tolstoy describes as the parallelogram of forces in mechanics corresponds directly to multiple-focus technique in narrative.

The Reader as Alchemist

Readers of multiple-focus texts can hardly be said to have an easy time of it. Every time a narrator interrupts a moving story to tell me that “the tale now abandons so-and-so in favor of what’s his name,” I get the vague feeling that I’m being had. What’s more, the narrator knows perfectly well that he’s aggravating me—otherwise, why would he systematically blame tradition for his unexpected hyperbolic modulations? I react similarly to the self-satisfied hopscotch of Hugo, Gide, and Luis Buñuel. Where I enjoyed the constant complicitous winks of the single-focus narrator, enlisting my sympathy for (or laughter at) the protagonist, the antics of the multiple-focus barker leave me cold, for I just can’t shake the feeling that the son of a gun is laughing at me every time he frustrates my desires. Instead of inviting me to become part of a privileged circle, sitting in judgment over someone else, multiple-focus narrators always seem to summon everyone else to laugh at me, to celebrate my inability to control the narrative. Even those narrators who don’t flaunt their power and my weakness leave me wondering about their novels. Along with Henry James, I keep asking myself what such “large loose baggy monsters” might actually mean (1934:84).

Reading dual-focus and single-focus narrative, I always feel at home—whether it is the group-based home of dual-focus texts or the single-focus identification with an individual. Coming to multiple-focus narrative with expectations developed in another world, I sense the new form as a loss, a lack, a diversion from the expected path. Trained to expect coherence and to respect legitimacy, I can’t feel at home in the multiple-focus world of illegitimate narration. Instead, I constantly find myself in the state of homelessness that constitutes the multiple-focus reader’s fundamental condition. However homeless multiple-focus texts may make me feel, they also offer new experiences, forcing me to see anew and to engage familiar objects and situations with renewed interest and attention. Where traditional materials once produced only traditional reactions, they now signify in new ways.

To make sense of multiple-focus texts, we must always step beyond the language in which they are couched. Only by discovering a common denominator among characters and activities are we able to stitch together the studiedly separate strands of the multiple-focus fabric. To each period of intense multiple-focus activity thus corresponds a particular type of the ineffable, a domain lying beyond the familiar world of the senses. The disparate characters and equally varied activities of the Grail romances are brought together thematically in the realm of the spiritual—invisible, otherworldly, beyond direct human perception, beyond direct representation by dual-focus and single-focus narrative. The allegorical mode of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance reaches beyond the senses by concentrating on abstract qualities. Prudence is no longer a typically dual-focus construction, represented (as in early medieval practice) by a lone female figure. In Bruegel’s drawing, Prudence becomes a quality rather than a character: an abstraction to be constructed on the basis of the examples portrayed.

In the late nineteenth century, multiple-focus narrative is regularly employed to stretch beyond the visible toward a so ciological level of abstraction that reveals greater truth than the separate physical observations out of which it is built. Zola’s peasants are carefully studied and minutely drawn, but no reader would seriously maintain that Zola’s genius stems from his ability to depict individual peasants, any more than Bruegel deserves accolades for his representation of individual faces. Instead, Zola’s multiple-focus fresco permits us to construct a generalized view of the peasantry and its passionate devotion to Mother Earth. In like manner, the philosophical novel joins cubism in turning narrative material into mental matter, always pushing the reader away from a traditional construction of the story toward a new kind of synthesis.

As long as the novel remains in the multiple-focus mode, it continues to seek new types of knowledge, new methods of knowing that cannot be represented directly. I remember as a Boy Scout being asked to chart a tree in the middle of a field. The problem was that we weren’t allowed to enter the field. First I had to locate on the map a position on one side of the field. Then I sighted through the tree to a spot on the other side of the field. After drawing a line between these two points I repeated the process on the remaining sides of the field, producing a line that crossed the first line right where the tree stood. Multiple-focus texts invert this process. Instead of asking the Boy Scout to map the tree, they provide a set of story lines in relation to which a given point must be constructed. Because the point is always located outside the area defined by the text’s narrative, it can be located only through triangulation and hem-naming.

The principles of inquiry at work in this Boy Scout exercise are strikingly similar to those regularly invoked by multiple-focus texts. We must follow individual characters, but we always do so with a certain degree of indifference, knowing that none of them individually represents the text’s object. Instead, we find ourselves tracing our own paths through the text, based on those of the characters but independent nonetheless, as we become full partners in the process of charting the text’s forbidden spaces, the realms (spiritual, allegorical, so ciological, philosophical) where the senses prove insufficient. Attention to precharted character paths, so salient at the start, is progressively replaced by active mapping of thematic intersections. Multiple-focus reading involves a process of rewriting, a tripartite procedure that engages the reader intellectually instead of (or in addition to) provoking identification:

1. The reader begins by following each character in turn, identifying with some more than others, fitting each piece into an overall outline of the story presented.
2. As the text advances, the reader reorders the narrative material according to an increasing number of thematic intersections, suggested by metaphoric ties, conceptual parallelism, or narratorial intervention.
3. Fixing on common traits or themes that bring characters and events together, the reader radically redefines the text, now seeing new characters and actions in terms of their ability to concretize conceptual categories. Once this hem-naming stage has been reached, characters and actions lose their autonomy, now being read for what they represent in thematic terms more than for what they are or do.

During the overall process of multiple-focus reading, readers are thus weaned from single-focus and dual-focus reading strategies, with their characteristic modes of identification, in favor of a new self-consciousness and a new liberty.

It often happens that the early chapters of multiple-focus texts are read according to single-focus or dual-focus standards. For many readers, this traditional mode of identification may last throughout the text. Les Mystères de Paris can hardly fail to begin for most readers as a dual-focus text. As it proceeds, some readers will continue to read it that way, while others will follow Sue’s commentary down a multiple-focus path. War and Peace and Man’s Fate remain fundamentally single-focus experiences for readers who, for whatever reason, find themselves intrigued by the fate of a single character. Films that follow several representative characters (such as those that concentrate on an army platoon or the victims of a natural disaster) often produce the same result, especially for viewers with a strong tendency toward personal identification with one of the film’s exemplary characters.

The process whereby readers begin to discover thematic intersections in multiple-focus narratives is among the most poorly understood in novelistic theory. Most criticism of multiple-focus texts has been formulated apropos of nineteenth-century or twentieth-century social or philosophical novels. Seeking the overall meaning of each text, critics rarely treat the construction of meaning as a process, instead taking the novel as a synchronic whole, fully known to the critic and available to the memory in a single Gestalt. Yet the process of reading multiple-focus narrative involves the excitement of apprenticeship to new modes of knowledge. The reader’s slowly acquired willingness to wrench traditional following-units out of their narrative context and realign them in new ways constitutes a characteristic aspect of multiple-focus narrative.

If the margins of my dual-focus texts are filled with comments noting the relationship between the two foci (“same language used for other side,” “parallel to her sleepless night on page x”), and the notes in my single-focus texts constantly refer to earlier moments in the life of the protagonist (“note change since previous occurrence,” “reversal of her earlier reaction”), the margins of my multiple-focus novels are systematically covered—and increasingly so as each novel progresses—with references to metaphoric or thematic motifs that tie together otherwise disparate sections (“same metaphor used for Tchen and Ferral—see pp. y and z,” “this evocation of the social rules vs. sincere expression motif ties the Schumacher-Lise-Marceau trio to the Count-Countess-pilot trio”). As we move through the text, increased attention to these thematic intersections progressively undermines our interest in the text’s narrative investment, eventually transferring our primary attention from the Chinese Revolution to the human condition and from two specific women to the very meaning of life and love.

Though at times frustrated by a lack of clear road signs, multiple-focus readers commonly gain significant pleasure from the heady liberty offered by multiple-focus texts. Convinced that they are breaking new ground each time they recognize a new thematic intersection, readers experience the excitement of the explorer, the inventor, indeed the alchemist. Turning mean narrative into the most noble of substances, multiple-focus readers become increasingly captivated by the search for the fifth essence, the quintessential conceptual pattern that gives meaning to the entire narrative universe. Where dual-focus narrative typically dispenses meaning from the narrator’s world above, and the single-focus form regularly puts the keys to meaning in the hands of the protagonist, multiple-focus narrative gives the reader a strong sense of playing God, of finding the formula capable of transforming not lead to gold but story to theme, a more noble alchemy yet.

The Multiple-Focus System

Because it has never previously been identified and analyzed as such, multiple-focus narrative has received relatively little attention. Though the separate traditions of the Grail romance, allegory, the generational novel, and the philosophical novel share many strategies, inability to connect their common narrative techniques has kept critics from discovering the fundamental building blocks of the multiple-focus narrative system. As I demonstrate in this chapter, multiple-focus texts deploy the following characteristics:

• A following-pattern that attends, in turn, to several different characters
• Hyperbolic modulation between successive following-units, typically justified by tradition or the aleatory nature of real life and marked by the use of white space, chapter divisions, or other separation devices
• Presentation of separate sections as preexisting, whether borrowed from tradition, written accounts, documentary footage, or reality itself
• Use of single-focus and dual-focus constitutive units only the better to critique single-focus and dual-focus modes of understanding
• Dependence on plot devices justifying contact among diverse characters (crowd scenes, carnivals, wars, natural disasters, etc.)
• Presentation of multiple separate views of the same event, thereby lending depth, volume, and complexity, while contesting simplistic explanations of the event
• Recourse to narratorial commentary, parallel scenes between otherwise unrelated characters, and realm-tying metaphors to assure multiple-focus interpretation of segments that might otherwise appear to call for a single-focus or dual-focus reading
• Readers who, discomfited by hyperbolic modulation, evince curiosity about connections between following-units, thereby elevating questions of causality into a theme of choice
• Use of the process of hem-naming (i.e., defining disparate characters and actions according to a common denominator) to make the separate parts cohere and signify in a uniquely multiple-focus manner
• A tendency toward conceptual interpretation, sometimes to the point of abandoning the domain of narrative altogether
• Signification that works like a mosaic and its tesserae: the separate following-units of multiple-focus narrative eventually signify as a whole something quite different from what they represent individually

Over the course of the centuries, the dominant multiple-focus conceptual connections have been spiritual (Middle Ages), allegorical (late Middle Ages and Renaissance), so ciological (late nineteenth century), and philosophical (twentieth century). Even though multiple-focus narrative has had a less-continuous history than its single-focus and dual-focus counterparts, multiple-focus texts have been sufficiently numerous to establish a strong tradition.

One question raised by this treatment of multiple-focus narrative regards the relationship between multiple-focus texts and their single-focus and dual-focus counterparts. Because multiple-focus texts depend heavily on single-focus and dual-focus components, they at times may seem to invite readers to reduce multiple-focus diversity and complexity to a relatively straightforward single-focus or dual-focus interpretation. Yet the most challenging multiple-focus texts, those that take the fullest advantage of multiple-focus resources, systematically make meaning through the totalizing strategies of hem-naming and conceptual resolution. This tendency to resolve a multiple-focus following-pattern into a single-focus or dual-focus framework may be more than a localized phenomenon. In one sense, all texts begin with what at first looks like multiplicity. Though it can easily appear as a composite, dependent on single-focus and dual-focus components, or as a latecomer, dependent on the prior existence of dual-focus and single-focus texts, multiple-focus narration may also be understood as a master mode, containing and explaining all others.