Theories are rightly measured by two complementary criteria, pertinence and elegance. Does the proposed theory match the phenomena in question? Then it is deemed pertinent. Is the proposed theory neat, clear, and economically formulated? Then it is deemed elegant. In developing a theory of narrative based on following-patterns I have considered an additional criterion: usefulness. Can the proposed theory be easily applied to a wide range of activities? Then it is deemed useful. Here I suggest some possible uses for the theory developed in the preceding chapters. Principal areas covered include textual analysis, literary and film history, social organization, religion, and political life.
Compared with other approaches, the narrative theory presented in this volume offers an important analytical benefit. Most existing approaches to narrative stress a single aspect of textual organization. While one group attends primarily to the reader’s relationship to the text (rhetorical criticism, point-of-view, and narrational approaches), other critics concentrate on internal textual connections (formalism, structuralism, and semiotics), while still others stress the large categories into which texts may be divided (archetypal and genre studies). What distinguishes the theory presented here is its ability to address all three concerns in a coordinated manner. Based on key rhetorical techniques (following and modulations) and built around typological analysis (recognition of the basic single-focus, dual-focus, and multiple-focus types), this theory also includes a key transformational component (concentrating on matched textual segments). Though these elements may be deployed separately, the theory is at its practical best only when the three approaches are combined, either simultaneously or serially. Textual analysis can only benefit from this coordinated strategy. A few examples are in order.
Stressing subject matter over presentational strategies or textual coherence, film critics treat “war movies” as a recognized type. The resources of the theory proposed here offer substantially more specificity. While battle stories might reasonably be expected to call for dual-focus treatment, careful analysis of individual texts, using all the resources at hand, leads to quite different conclusions, more nuanced and more accurate. Like The Song of Roland, some battle stories are built around a resolutely dual-focus following-pattern, but others, like The Red Badge of Courage, concentrate instead on a single character. Even these clearly affiliated texts may include contrary-to-type segments (such as the attention lavished on Roland’s decisions during the attack on the rearguard), which are accessible through careful rhetorical and transformational analysis.
Perhaps more interesting still are the many battle stories that personalize the conflict by weaving an individual account into the larger conflict. Earlier, I noted important differences between John Wayne and Henry Fleming, the central character of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. From film to film, Wayne seems eternally the same, whether he plays a navy commander, a cavalry captain, or a gun-totin’ sheriff. Unlike Henry, he no longer needs a red badge of courage. In John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, however, Wayne’s humanity and his capacity for change are demonstrated through subtle treatment of his apprehension about impending retirement. Though this film may at first seem just another western, just another Wayne film—just another rote dual-focus offering—careful inspection reveals a studied interweaving of dual-focus motifs and single-focus concerns. Much of the film is given over to a clichéd clash between youthful, bloodthirsty Indians and disciplined horse soldiers under the command of the restrained, grey-haired Wayne, along with the obligatory courtship between Wayne’s second-in-command and a comely eastern lass. But She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is also the single-focus story of Wayne’s concerns about his uncertain future. Predicate transformations centering around Wayne are repeatedly interwoven with epic and pastoral subject substitutions. The theory presented here facilitates detailed analysis of the film’s repeated changes of technique and focus.
Different still are the many war films that concentrate on a full platoon rather than a single individual (Tay Garnett’s Bataan, Edward Ludwig’s The Fighting Seabees, Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan). Alternately following an Italian immigrant, New York Jew, Southern farmboy, Midwesterner, African American, and other characters clearly chosen for the categories they represent, “platoon” films offer a multiple-focus view of war. The combined resources of following, transformational analysis, and typological evaluation are necessary to distinguish among these extremely varied “war films.” The more mixed the text, the more beneficial this particular trio of approaches.
Because this theory deploys three separate but coordinated approaches, it provides an especially welcome resource for analyzing texts that make their meaning by blending divergent narrative strategies. Take the famous case of Madame Bovary’s “Comices agricoles” sequence. This justly celebrated rendition of a county fair—as observed from a quiet corner where the country nobleman Rodolphe is actively courting Emma, the rural doctor’s wife who dreams of fancy dresses and far-off places—has alternately been treated as a key moment in the development of Emma’s fantasies and as the very type of a modernist technique known as “spatial form” (Frank 1963). For one group of critics, the focal character Emma Bovary is the center of this scene, as she is of the rest of the novel. For another group, Flaubert’s treatment of the fair is marked by its very centerlessness, by a sense of unvectored space, subordinated to no character in particular.
The theory elaborated in this book facilitates a more satisfactory treatment of the “Comices agricoles” scene. A multiple-focus incursion in what is otherwise a strongly single-focus novel, the county fair scene stands out both for its reinforcement of other peasant practices and for its status as a countertype to Emma’s fondly remembered experience at the Vaubyessard ball. On the one hand, it provides grist for the mill of early critics who treated Madame Bovary primarily as a drab documentary of nineteenth-century rural life in France. On the other hand, it serves as a means to measure the distance separating Emma’s dreams from her reality. Each individual following-unit offers multiple opportunities for transformational analysis, producing not just a single straightforward classification, or even a simple mix of two different approaches, but a structured account that explains why a scene is susceptible to multiple readings, all the while linking the scene’s various parts to the diverse novel segments that they evoke and transform. To analyze a complex author like Flaubert, who always works several strains at a time, a multipartite theory like the one proposed here is clearly necessary.
Operating simultaneously on several different levels, this theory is especially well equipped to handle the contradictions, paradoxes, and slippages that characterize long and complex narratives. When Eugène Sue virtually pleads with his readers to process his story according to progressive social standards, our tripartite analysis of Les Mystères de Paris helps us understand why he should need to work so hard to get us to consider social questions. The novel’s following-pattern and transformational relationships are all carefully aligned to stress dual-focus relationships and values. As a foreign prince with an indefensible right uppercut, the hero Rodolphe provides little grist for the social mill. Because his novel employs a resolutely dual-focus following-pattern, the only way that Sue can possibly get us to accomplish the hem-naming characteristic of multiple-focus narrative is through extensive narratorial intervention.
Émile Zola tackles a similar problem in L’Assommoir, but as a confirmed naturalist he must do so without the support of an obtrusive narrator. Just as Les Mystères de Paris fails to inspire socially conscious multiple-focus readings because of its obvious dual-focus debts, so the single-focus organization of the first two-thirds of L’Assommoir apparently assigns blame to the protagonist Gervaise for the very problems that Zola wants us to ascribe to broader social structures. Only through a substantial change in following-pattern and narrative transformations during the final one-third of the novel is Zola eventually able to open new multiple-focus vistas. The difficulty of inducing multiple-focus readings without resorting to narrative intervention helps us understand why authors like Lawrence and Malraux felt the need to create mouthpiece characters who are capable of assisting the narrator in hem-naming the novel’s apparently diverse cast. Access to three separate analytical tools is what makes analyses like these possible.
In cinema, where sound and image are added to language, the availability of multiple approaches is even more important. One area where the present theory offers especially welcome new resources is adaptation: the combination of fine-grain analysis and broad-based type recognition makes it possible to tease out the essential differences between original and adaptation in a new and more satisfying way. Take the opening of the 1995 BBC version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The novel famously begins with an apparent truism, vouched for by the narrator: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” The opening pages of the novel proceed to illustrate the narrator’s initial statement, concentrating on no one character in particular. Before eventually homing in on Elizabeth, the following-pattern thus gives us every reason to believe that Austen’s novel is a multiple-focus treatise on the generalities of country life. Director Andrew Davies handles the beginning of the 1995 BBC version in a totally different manner. Before we learn the narrator’s truth about single men and their desires, before we even meet Elizabeth, we are shown Darcy and Bingley riding the English countryside while discussing a handsome manor house. Cut to Elizabeth, out walking and apparently watching the two men ride by. We then follow Elizabeth home, taking her point of view as she observes the Bennet family activities at Longbourn.
Far from inviting the multiple-focus reading that Austen offers, this initial sequence sets up two competing readings: the powerful male/female balancing of the opening shots recalls many a dual-focus beginning, while the subsequent sequence suggests a single-focus treatment of Elizabeth’s story (an impression that is reinforced when Austen’s opening sentence is spoken by Elizabeth in the film’s next scene). The following-pattern adopted by Davies for the rest of his film reinforces this hesitation. Though the film follows Elizabeth both earlier and more overtly than the novel, thereby reinforcing the novel’s single-focus tendencies, Davies’ practice of cutting back and forth regularly between Darcy and Elizabeth—along with a mise-en-scène that includes Darcy in the background of countless shots of Elizabeth—pushes the film in the direction of dual-focus pastoral.
Though this is more a thumbnail sketch than a proper analysis, it should be clear that the approach facilitated by this theory attends not only to small-scale particulars—scripting, shot selection, mise-en-scène—but also to extremely broad concerns, such as the film’s manipulation of the following-pattern to cue viewer reactions different from those elicited by Austen. Only by connecting the smallest intratextual details to broad intertextual categories can this analysis offer an appropriate level of specificity.
Because the theory developed in this book melds typological analysis with rhetorical and transformational components, it offers substantial resources for the historian of literature or film. In this section I provide three examples: the rise of the novel in France and England, the growing taste for metonymic modulations, and the surprising effect that theatrical versions of novels have had on film adaptations.
Attempts to describe and explain the rise of the novel typically stress realistic content, increased psychological interest, and the influence of diverse popular models. From the standpoint of the theory presented here, something quite different is taking place. The major change in narrative style between the Renaissance and the eighteenth century involves a radical reworking of the dominant following-pattern. From Lodovico Ariosto and Edmund Spenser to Paul Scarron and Madeleine de Scudéry, late Renaissance narrative is heavily marked by the interlaced following practices of multiple-focus Grail romances. These large books (in terms of physical size as well as length) routinely follow multiple characters, moving from one to another through ample use of hyperbolic modulation. During the first half of the seventeenth century, interlaced romances were so popular that multivolume French novels would appear within months across the Channel in English translations. Yet by the early eighteenth century, this mode had been almost entirely replaced by pocket-sized single-focus narratives bearing nary a trace of hyperbolic modulation. What happened to the market for these internationally renowned multiple-focus products? How did they get supplanted in the course of only a few decades?
While other theories are better equipped to deal with the realistic subject matter and popular language of the early novel, this theory is especially well suited to describe and explain the changes in narrative strategy that characterize the rise of the novel. Unrecognized as a major literary type, vilified because of its lack of a classical model, the novel remained subject, throughout the seventeenth century, to the influence of more powerful modes—especially theater. A literary debate waged during the 1630s in France would eventually play an important role in the development of the novel. Dubbed the “Quarrel of Le Cid,” after the Corneille play that triggered the controversy, public discussion covered everything from allowable rhymes and appropriate versification to suitable subjects and proper story construction. Particular attention was given to the three “unities”: unity of place, time, and action. While the first two (requiring a play’s action to take place in a single location within a time frame of no more than twenty-four hours) had substantial importance for the development of neoclassical theater, they had minimal effect on the novel.
More complex and ultimately more important, the concept of unity of action eventually contributed directly to the development of new narrative strategies. At the time of the quarrel, plays and novels shared a tendency toward multiple locations, multiple plots, and multiple main characters. Successive scenes in early-seventeenth-century baroque plays commonly jump from continent to continent and back again; when one plot line flags, a new set of characters, problems, and locations is introduced. To the 1630s arbiters of taste gathered in the French Academy, these practices were anathema. Plays, they insisted, should henceforth present a single, unified plot, all of whose elements must be presented from the start. Plot development must be logical and smooth, with each scene connected to the next by the continued presence of at least one character on stage. Eventually, this emphasis on unity of action did away with the adventure scenarios of dramatists like Alexandre Hardy, leading instead to Jean Racine’s characteristic alternation between a scene where a principal character acts or speaks in public and an introspective scene (with or without a confidant/e), where the same character reflects on the previous public situation.
For half a century, the precepts imposed by the Quarrel of Le Cid were applied primarily to the theatrical domain from which they originally sprang. The 1678 publication of Madame de Lafayette’s novelette, La Princesse de Clèves, would change all that. Especially concerned about the use of included stories, public debate about this short novel revived interest in the notion of unity of action as a standard for literary cohesiveness. Discussion was sufficiently animated to give rise to a book-length critique of La Princesse de Clèves (by Jean-Baptiste-Henry du Trousset de Valincour), followed by a book-length defense (by Madame de Lafayette’s advocate, Abbot Jean Antoine de Charnes). According to Valincour, novels are not unified if they include stories about secondary actions. Though the novels of the previous generation had regularly been laced with literally dozens of included stories, Valincour and his allies now sought to subject contemporary narratives to the principles previously adopted for the theater. Charnes’s rebuttal defends the novel’s unity, insisting that the included stories are justified because they serve to measure the protagonist’s reaction. Requiring that every component be subordinated to the main character, the standard of unity of action would henceforth be directly applied to the novel. Charnes’s defense of La Princesse de Clèves makes him one of the first important theorists of single-focus narrative—and the novel.
Within a few short years, the narrative principles developed during what we might call the “Quarrel of La Princesse de Clèves” would be turned into hard and fast rules by the theoreticians of the increasingly successful French novelette. In 1683, a writer known simply as Du Plaisir published a short treatise that would become a manifesto for the new generation of novelists. In the spare, clear prose of his Sentiments sur les lettres et sur l’ histoire avec des scrupules sur le style, Du Plaisir insists on a single principal event, internally justified plot connections, and a coherent narrative structure. Abandoned forever are multiple plots, chance events, and an interventionist narrator. Heirs to a distinguished group of Renaissance scholars (Torquato Tasso, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Lodovico Castelvetro), the era’s Aristotelians were quick to jump on board. For decades, René Rapin’s 1674 Réflexions sur la Poétique d’Aristote—published in English translation before the year was out—continued to influence British literature.
Perhaps most important for the development of single-focus fiction in England was the attention that William Congreve (and other early novelists) gave to the French quarrel. As Congreve says in the preface to his Incognita (1692), “I resolved . . . to imitate dramatick writing, namely, in the design, contexture and result of the plot” (1930:242). Insisting that every aspect of his story is subservient to the main plot line, Congreve notes that “in a comedy [i.e., stage play] this would be called the unity of action.” For well over a century, on both sides of the Channel, the novel would remain primarily a single-focus affair. Instrumental in the key neoclassical process of expanding Aristotelian theatrical standards to the novel, the Quarrel of La Princesse de Clèves also underlies twentieth-century scholars’ tendency to limit the category of narrative to texts that combine unity of action with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Recognition of the novel’s single-focus underpinnings offers a useful complement to views that stress the novel’s development of individualism. Referring to “the autonomy of the individual as it developed in the tradition of Locke, Hume, and Smith” (2005:15), Nancy Armstrong’s persuasive argument in How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900, suggests that the novel “was born as authors gave narrative form to this wish for a social order sufficiently elastic to accommodate individualism” (139). Armstrong’s analysis comes into clearer focus—in detail and in general—when it is seen through the resources presented in this book. At the level of narrative technique, we may note that the “narrative form” that novels initially provide is precisely the mode that I have identified as single-focus. The resources that make it possible for the novel to feature the individual are those outlined here in chapter 5.
For Armstrong, the development of a literary form dedicated to presentation of protagonists who are interesting because of their individuality does not begin until such time as Locke and others were able to enunciate a new philosophy based on the autonomy of the individual. The approach presented here offers a wider understanding of the novel’s connections. Before the seventeenth-century revival of single-focus narrative, two strong single-focus narrative traditions had already made their influence felt. From Augustine and hagiography to Luther and the Protestant Reformation, the Christian religion had produced a vigorous single-focus tradition, providing a strong foundation for the novelistic individual. Similarly, single-focus Arthurian romances had offered an important alternative to the dual-focus approach of early medieval epic. Championing individuals over institutions, tales of knightly prowess provided yet another model for the novel. Viewing the novel through the approach presented in this book helps us understand both the specific techniques necessary for the novel’s increased attention to individuals and the broader historical context within which the novel exploits its single-focus heritage.
Careful study of following-pattern developments often offers new insight into the history of narrative. A similar situation obtains with modulations. Nineteenth-century narrative technique is heavily marked by unspoken assumptions regarding modulation choice. While popular novelists continued to resort to metaphoric and hyperbolic modulations throughout the nineteenth century, those with higher aspirations voluntarily restricted themselves to metonymic modulations. The reasons for this self-imposed restriction are quite clear. Revealing the active hand of a narrator, metaphoric and hyperbolic modulations provide a poor match for the era’s realistic aesthetic. Metonymic modulations, on the other hand, seem to arise out of the narrative material itself, thereby concealing narrational activity. Nineteenth-century novelists became increasingly adept at leading their characters to a group scene where other characters could be momentarily featured or from which a new character could be followed. Instead of intervening, the narrator appears to be doing nothing but observing. To keep this metonymic slant from becoming too restrictive, authors increasingly borrowed the resources of typography, using chapter changes or white space on the page to dissimulate hyperbolic modulations. Though the choice and manipulation of modulations has long played an essential role in the narrative art, their story has hardly begun to be told.
Just as the choice of modulations was strongly affected by questions of literary prestige, so the early history of cinema would be heavily influenced by the differing status of its novelistic and theatrical sources. The split between primarily single-focus classical novels and typically dual-focus or multiple-focus popular serials in nineteenth-century fiction is mirrored and heightened by an even more evident split in nineteenth-century theater. On the one side stands the “well-made play,” championed by Francisque Sarcey, Victorien Sardou, Augustin Eugène Scribe, and other students of theater history. Corresponding fairly closely to the efforts of an Austen or a Flaubert, the well-made play followed Aristotelian principles, with particular emphasis on the importance of unity of action—this in an era when the popular stage was occupied by melodramas built according to principles of crosscutting and episodic construction like those borrowed by D. W. Griffith from the stage versions of The Cricket on the Hearth, Enoch Arden, Ramona, Judith of Bethulia, and The Clansman (The Birth of a Nation).
Two basic principles regarding the relationship of the novel to the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century popular stage deserve mention here. First, popular dramatists tended to choose their material from existing texts whose melodramatic proclivities were quite obvious. Thus Balzac, Dumas, Dickens, Hugo, and Zola remained their objects of choice. Second, whatever the source material, late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century stage adaptations imprint the popular theater’s own melodramatic stamp on the original.
The role of melodrama in an apparently classical narrative will be clarified by the example of one of Balzac’s most durably popular novels, Le Père Goriot, which assures continuity, linearity, and psychological causality by focusing on the social and moral development of young Eugène de Rastignac. Following the protagonist almost exclusively from beginning to end, the narrator invites us to pay primary attention to Rastignac in his twin roles of detective and student of life. With Rastignac we discover the activities, nefarious and charitable, of his fellow boarders at the Pension Vauquer. With Rastignac we also learn about the social mores and moral dilemmas that attend life in the modern world. Viewed in this manner, Le Père Goriot stands as the very model of single-focus narrative.
From the picaresque episodes of a Lazarillo de Tormes or Alain René Lesage’s Gil Blas de Santillane to the historical novels of Prosper Mérimée and Sir Walter Scott, from the Bildungsroman as practiced by Pierre de Marivaux and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to the nascent modernism of Gustave Flaubert, from the roman d’analyse of Madame de Lafayette to the point-of-view experiments of Henry James, the pattern remains the same. Continuity is assured by consistent following of a single character along with whom we discover the surrounding world. While the protagonist’s body may continue to serve the familiar adventure functions assigned to it by romance, the protagonist’s mind takes on a newly expanded role. Opinions and attitudes usurp the position once reserved for actions alone. Sleuthing replaces dueling as the key to success.
When Le Père Goriot was adapted for the stage, however, these characteristic single-focus attributes were abandoned (Barbéris 1972). Instead of concentrating on Rastignac, the melodramatic stage version centers on Vautrin, the Mephistophelean ex-convict whose get-rich-quick schemes simultaneously horrify and intrigue his young charge, and on Goriot, the realist Lear, the spaghetti-making saint who would pair Rastignac with one of his money-hungry daughters. Contemporary novels were regularly subjected by popular theater to this type of transformation. Single-focus coming-of-age or detective stories were routinely turned into dual-focus confrontations between good and evil. While Balzac’s Rastignac is the consummate single-focus character, tying scene to scene through his well-developed psychology, ever-changing throughout the course of the novel, Goriot and Vautrin seem drawn from another world, held in ritual bondage to their roles, like the blocking characters of New Comedy or, more to the point, like the antagonists of melodrama. One standing for Good and the other representing Evil, Goriot and Vautrin offer twin myths of paternity. The stage version of Le Père Goriot actively exploited these proclivities. Where Vautrin and Goriot had in the novel served only as models for Rastignac’s conduct, on the stage they took on the directly and melodramatically opposed positions that they have retained in popular memory of the novel.
Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, this pattern would be repeated. Psychologically based single-focus novels were routinely turned into melodramatic dual-focus stage plays. When the young cinema industry sought to embellish its reputation by producing film versions of well-known novels, the theater provided a ready model. Instead of adapting novels directly, however, Hollywood borrowed available stage versions. Rather than emulating Robert Louis Stevenson’s story of psychology and detection, several different filmmakers based their versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on the stage play, which reinforces its dual-focus symmetry by the addition of a second female lead who is absent from Stevenson’s tale. No matter how obviously a title apparently indicates that a film was borrowed from a short story or novel, a stage version is invariably the film’s immediate source. The title may suggest Arthur Conan Doyle as the film’s likely origin, but the 1939 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (directed by Alfred L. Werker) is actually based on William Gillette’s melodramatic stage play. Though a justly famous article by Sergei Eisenstein (1949) has convinced generations of scholars that Griffith’s films were modeled on the novels of Charles Dickens, and that Hollywood film production in general owes a heavy debt to the nineteenth-century novel, it was actually the popular stage that influenced Griffith and his colleagues (Altman 1989).
The importance of this insight for the analysis and history of Hollywood cinema can hardly be overstated. Because Hollywood borrowed from stage versions rather than from the novel itself, and because those stage versions had recast fundamentally single-focus material in melodramatic form, early American filmmaking was heavily dual-focus in nature. Only much later would the film industry develop techniques enabling it to handle the complex psychology required for single-focus treatment of extended narratives. Once again, we find that an important historical claim is made possible only by a multipartite theory of narrative capable of recognizing essential disparities between differing versions of the “same” story.
As useful as the present theory may be for textual analysis and literary history, its most far-reaching contributions lie in another area entirely. Since narrative is an abstraction, a mental construct, it may easily be transferred not only from one familiar medium to another (oral story, printed tale, painting, comic strip, film) but also to the events of daily life. Though the principles of this focal theory of narrative are presented here primarily through literary examples, it is important to recognize the applicability of those principles to a far greater range of cases. Since narrative exists wherever narrative drive leads people to perceive the presence of narrative material and narrational activity, the approach developed in these pages may profitably be applied to such diverse human activities as architecture (which regiments narrative movement), religion (typically based on sacred history expressed through narrative), politics (which always involves questions of narrational control), and even the exchange of goods (which follows standards established by familiar narratives). In these cases—and many others—the analytical principles and language developed in this volume may usefully be applied.
At the end of chapter 3, I show how a tendency to develop spatial relationships at the expense of temporal sensitivity connects dual-focus narrative to the belief systems of “traditional” societies, as outlined by Mircea Eliade in Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (1959). The dualism, spatial orientation, neglect of time, and emphasis on long-term stability that characterize dual-focus narrative also find a fascinating echo in anthrolopogists’ attempts to define the illusory phenomenon known as “peasant society.” George M. Foster provides an especially clear statement:
The model of cognitive orientation that seems to me best to account for peasant behavior is the “Image of Limited Good.” By “Image of Limited Good” I mean that broad areas of peasant behavior are patterned in such fashion as to suggest that peasants view their social, economic, and natural universes—their total environment—as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply, as far as the peasant is concerned. Not only do these and all other “good things” exist in finite and limited quantities, but in addition there is no way directly within peasant power to increase the available quantities. It is as if the obvious fact of land shortage in a densely populated area applied to all other desired things: not enough to go around. “Good,” like land, is seen as inherent in nature, there to be divided and redivided, if necessary, but not to be augmented. (1965:296)
Foster goes on to show how every aspect of peasant behavior, from sibling rivalry to the use of treasure stories to account for unexplained wealth, can be derived from this model.
According to Foster, the logical consequence of this system, at least for intrasocietal transactions, is that every agreement must be bipolar and dyadic (1961). In this he parallels directly the findings of Axel Olrik on the “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative,” which include the “Law of Two to a Scene” and its correlative “Law of Contrast” (1965). Foster suggests that everything in the peasant system operates according to the analogy of land, which is chronically in short supply. The spatial organization of dual-focus narrative exactly mirrors this arrangement. When “real estate” retains its original meaning—when land is the only real value—then the sum of all values remains constant. Because the amount of land available is indeed finite, the economics of a given area obey a logic known as “zero-sum.” Whatever one person possesses must necessarily reduce the wealth available for another. Perhaps this is why traditional societies are so often organized according to dual-focus principles and regularly produce a preponderance of dual-focus texts.
Based on a set of presuppositions matched to constraints imposed by external factors, what Foster calls the economy of “limited good” depends on a mental state at least as much as on economic conditions. Communities operating according to the economy of limited good develop an elaborate set of self-regulatory controls designed to preclude alienation of community wealth or accumulation of private wealth. This essentially agricultural system, based on natural and historical limitation of access to real estate, measures time cyclically, assuring, for example, the complete disposal of each year’s crop before the next is touched, even if that requires recourse to burning or bacchanalia. In such a society, the typically dual-focus zero-sum system governs all transactions. Not only is it assumed that the community and its enemies compete for a limited supply of land (whatever they take, we lose, and vice versa), but all internal economic interchange takes on the character of bartering (gain and loss being balanced through the barter system). The purchasing process thus takes on a ritual character, with production directly related to consumption, usually through an “on demand” system. When I need a new barrel I go to the barrel-maker and he makes me one, charging me the going rate for barrels, the cost being always roughly equivalent to the expense of time plus materials, with supply or desire having little effect. This system—partially retained in rural areas throughout the world—plays down differences among individuals of the same community, stressing instead the differences between communities.
It is instructive to note how the “limited good” arrangement is transformed with the institution of a market economy. Strictly speaking, market economies depend on the possibility of stocking produce, with the attendant practice of releasing merchandise only in favorable circumstances. Now, consider what the ability to stock the previous crop (a self-regulated as well as a naturally imposed impossibility in the “limited good” system) might mean to an economy. If the entire crop of wheat must be sold within the same limited period, then prices will be strictly dependent on the weather—no farmer’s crop will be worth any more than another’s, for all will be sold roughly at the same time under the same conditions. As soon as it becomes possible to stock wheat from season to season, however, two radical changes take place. The farmer (or someone storing the grain on his behalf) is now faced with decisions about the optimum moment to release the wheat onto the market. Buyers, too, must make decisions, at every point gauging the likelihood that the cost will go up or down in the future. It is not just that the law of supply and demand becomes operative with the market system: even more important in the new system is the possibility of manipulating supply—and thus demand.
For the barrel-maker, the new market economy introduces radical changes. Instead of limiting his output to making barrels on demand, the cooper now makes merchandise in advance, calculating (correctly) that many of the new system’s consumers will be willing to pay a premium for a barrel that is ready when they want it (even if they have to take the “wrong” wood or size). Instead of making every barrel for a specific consumer, the cooper is now producing for a market, whose demands he must regularly estimate. Instead of fabricating products for proven needs, the barrel-maker now produces for the consumer’s desires, or what he thinks those desires are or even—one day he will discover—what he can turn those desires into. Every time the cooper sits down to his task he is thus confronted by a decision: Should he maximize usefulness or marketability? These two desiderata are not always mutually exclusive, but the presence of competition from other barrel-makers (absent in the old system where societal self-regulation assured just the right number of coopers for the population) increases the need to maintain low prices and produce models that are both desired by the clientele and profitable for the cooper.
Just as producers are regularly faced with a choice between quality and profit, so consumers regularly treat the purchasing process as a complex speculation. If goods are measured as plus and costs as minus, the sum of every transaction in the world of limited good is zero. Goods always cost their worth, because they are worth the same to everyone. Wealth is a sign of chance or God’s will (as expressed, for example, by birth). Market economies introduce an entirely different situation, where purchases are no longer paid for in direct proportion to their utility or quality, or even in proportion to the current state of the individual’s desire, but according to the general state of the market. Because of the mediation of desire, you no longer “get what you pay for”: the same product may differ in value for different individuals, or even for the same individual at different times. Through judicious purchases, individuals can effect transactions with a positive value, but by unenlightened spending they can end up losing value.
Each purchase constitutes a radically new experience that depends on the current state of the individual as well as that of the market. Individuals must project their future desires (because a plus value purchase that becomes a minus value purchase the next day through a change of desire is to be avoided). They must evaluate all items offered according to their own current state, judging each according to the twin criteria of desire and cost. Before the market economy, no such situation obtained. One wouldn’t order slippers for work shoes, but knowing one needed work shoes one would simply order “work shoes, size 11.” This was not a choice but a ritual. When something needed replacement, we did as we did the time before, as our parents and grandparents did before that. The overall needs of the community as a whole guaranteed a direct relationship between need, price, and quality, whereas, in the new system, individual differences assure an unstable market, one where each transaction remains a speculation, with value to be lost or gained depending on the individual’s prowess as a purchaser.
The market economy generates massive attempts to manipulate desire, since desire is not only what sells merchandise but also the only possible benchmark on which the notion of a “successful” purchase can be based (much as, in Martin Luther’s Protestant approach to religion, the individual criterion of “faith” is alone operative). In the new system, advertising fulfills the role of the single-focus model or tempter figure. Publicity points, saying “this is what you should want.” Publicity plays the serpent, offering the fruit not as fruit but as object of desire. No longer considered in terms of its utility to all humans, the fruit is now evaluated in terms of its potential function in the life of an individual. Eve is there to express desire, Adam to count the expense; together they figure our twin reaction to every purchase: gain (satisfaction of desires) and loss (cost).
Single-focus medieval romances operate according to the same principle. Woman is the prize, but no longer woman as woman. In a dual-focus pastoral like Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, or in a traditional society, a woman is a commodity like any other. The bride price may depend on social level or even skills but not on desire, for basically a woman is seen as a woman: that is, as a human being capable of bearing children. With twelfth-century romance, something radically new enters Western culture. In conjunction with the courtly love motif, a woman becomes something more (or less) than a child-bearer. Her previous primary (reproductive) function is replaced by her ability to be attractive: that is, desirable. External attributes must now be brought into play, attributes that can be more easily manipulated than the inherent virtue of fertility. As with the market system, the value + price = zero setup is transformed. When a bride was seen solely as a child-bearer, her value to any man was the same. As an attractive individual, however, her desirability depends on the admirer or potential husband.
The multiple correspondences between the market economy and single-focus narrative practice stand out as clearly as the concordance between the economy of limited good and dual-focus principles. Producer and consumer alike, along with the single-focus protagonist and reader, can no longer depend on a time-honored, community-assured method of supplying their needs. They are instead marked by freedom and choice, along with the value speculation that accompanies them. Instead of being restricted to the limited repertory characteristic of the dual-focus system, their needs grow out of a desire to posit and maximize individual value. Replacing the old system’s cyclical sense of time and the eternal return of structures, events, and values, with a clear sense of temporal progression and a tendency toward accumulation of capital, the new system emphasizes individuals’ ability to modify their positions through careful management. At the same time, the market system accentuates monetary measures of value over the fixed, absolute values of the old system. This new role of money, a transferable measure of value, accompanied by a preference for secondary over essential characteristics, for desirability over utility, for quantity of sales over quality of product, encapsulates one of the most important ramifications of the market system.
The market system leads to a clear preference for exchange values over use values, along with the commodification of art forms and other values once considered outside the realm of commerce. Essence, quality, and use disappear in favor of money, quantity, and exchange. As part of this slippage from use to exchange values comes the notion that value itself has a price. Where values were once absolutes (the law, birth, virginity, allegiance), incommensurable with anything temporal or finite, value can now be measured and thus purchased. Nobility becomes a commodity to be bought or sold by ambitious individuals or enterprising governments. Religious salvation becomes an affair of pardoners and indulgences. General Motors can now calculate the value of a human life. The value of art is soon measured by price rather than by beauty.
This long detour has been necessary in order to highlight the parallels between economic and social changes in post-Renaissance Western Europe and the blossoming of single-focus narratives culminating in the triumph of the novel. The novel is born with the market economy, out of the tension between use and exchange values. For every Princesse de Clèves, who takes her own self-knowledge as a true indication of her (lack of) value, there is a Moll Flanders, who can announce “how necessary it is for all women who expect anything in the world to preserve the character of their virtue even when perhaps they may have sacrificed the thing itself” (Defoe 1964:123). Both remain caught between the two types of value, their dilemmas defined by the gap separating use and exchange. Throughout its history, the novel has gravitated toward individuals who refuse simple solutions to the dichotomy between use value and exchange value. The novel owes a heavy debt to the single-focus mode and its problematics, for the very right to become a single-focus protagonist depends on ability to incarnate the tension between the old, dual-focus values and the new values introduced by the single-focus mode.
One further analogy, this time to a geo graphical model, deserves to be made here. In his seminal discussion of History in Geographic Perspective (1971), Edward Fox distinguishes between two different types of geo graphical relationship: the areal (i.e., area-oriented) and the linear. Areal systems depend on self-sufficient land-based societies, where long-distance transport of goods is not economically feasible. Primarily agricultural, these communities are typically organized around central market towns through which transactions are carried out on a regular basis. In linear systems, in contrast, the possibility of transport over water makes commerce over long distances perfectly practicable. Within this second system, cities rapidly develop and trade with other, often quite distant cities rather than primarily with their areally organized hinterlands. These two systems often coexist as close neighbors (areally organized Prussia next to linear Dutch merchant cities, landlocked Paris and Burgundy just inland from port cities on the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean), yet each develops and maintains distinctive social patterns and administrative structures. As Fox points out, the commercial societies characteristic of linear systems
have almost always been ruled by narrow oligarchies. Policies, it is true, were fashioned by agreement, but they usually involved large sums of money, whether for defense, aggression, or investment, and were consequently made by those whose fortunes were involved. . . . In contrast, the general organization of agricultural communities has commonly been military, and their government a chain of command. Because security depended on military discipline, obedience was more important than consensus. Where commercial cities were characteristically political, agricultural societies tended to produce administrative institutions. (1971:38)
Fox goes on to hypothesize that the rise of the bourgeoisie in the commercial system, along with the importance of written documents, tends to encourage the early development of extensive and sophisticated literary production, while the traditional military character of the agricultural society tends instead to perpetuate traditional literary forms, often oral and popular in nature.
This rapid summary does little justice to Fox’s argument, yet it serves to underline additional parallels between social organization and the narrative analysis presented here. The areal nature of agricultural society, its tendency to turn inward, its subordination of individuals to societal defense, and its preference for traditional literary forms embody dual-focus structure and thematics, while the linear nature of commercial society, with its emphasis on individual fortunes and personal decisions, clearly rehearses the basic organization of single-focus narrative.
The most widely distributed book in the Western world, the Bible, has heavily influenced our notions of the connection between narrative and daily life. In preceding chapters, I note the heavily dual-focus nature of Old Testament narratives, along with the strongly single-focus orientation of the Gospels and related New Testament books. This initial analysis takes on substantially more interest when it is placed in the context of established religions and the parts of the Bible that they regularly quote or on which their rituals are based. For Jews, the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh remains central to every aspect of religious life. The dual-focus tales of Exodus, Judges, Esther, and Maccabees all provide important models for a religion that depends heavily on a distinction between those who are within and those who are without. Just as these books tell stories of the separation of the world into the Israelites and their foes, so Jewish life is heavily dependent on rituals that celebrate inclusion while threatening exile for the unfaithful—the ultimate punishment in a dual-focus system. Books of history, books of law, books of wisdom and prophecy—the Hebrew Bible contains a resolutely dual-focus model for daily life.
As the founding documents of Christian doctrine, the New Testament Gospels offer a clear alternative to Jewish ritual. Organized in a fundamentally single-focus manner, the Gospels follow a single individual and stress typically single-focus values. The Old Testament emphasizes externals like completed acts, while the Gospels dwell on intention and other internal factors. For Jews, birth is all-important, whereas Jesus insists on choosing his own family (Matthew 12:46–50). Whereas Jewish dietary laws stress food restrictions, Jesus insists that “not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man” (Matthew 15:11, Mark 7:15). Speaking in parables rather than pronouncing laws, Jesus lays a heavy responsibility on his listeners to provide their own interpretation of his words. Capped by the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the Gospels provide model after model for a single-focus understanding of life.
What appears to be a clear split between a dual-focus Old Testament and a single-focus New Testament is contested, however, by the presence of Apocalypse at the very end of the Christian Bible. Strongly dual-focus in construction, the Revelation of John (as Apocalypse is also called) was not included in the biblical canon without a fight. Its presence in the Bible testifies to a deep-seated hesitation about the place of dual-focus narratives and values in Christian theology and life. Just as the early church felt a strong need for apocalyptic stories like the dual-focus tales of martyr saints, the high Middle Ages would introduce a fundamentally dual-focus notion into Christian theology in the figure of the Antichrist. Borrowed from an Old Testament apocalyptic passage (Daniel 7:25), the Antichrist provided a convenient opponent for Jesus, making it easy to turn New Testament single-focus passages into dual-focus narratives. Though the Gospels and the Pauline epistles provide only a few very short apocalyptic passages (e.g., Matthew 24–25 and II Thessalonians 2), and no basis at all for the Antichrist or other medieval dual-focus staples such as the Harrowing of Hell, the dual-focus nature of medieval Christianity made it virtually obligatory to furnish sufficient dual-focus material to fill Sunday sermons and cover church walls and windows. By stressing the dual-focus books of the Old Testament—along with Apocalypse—as a source for narrative illustration, and by turning the Gospels into dual-focus material by the addition of the Antichrist, medieval Christianity built a fundamentally dual-focus religion.
Fascinatingly, this tendency to bend Christianity toward dual-focus values has over the last century resurfaced among evangelical sects. While Conservative and Reform Judaism were increasingly bending toward the single-focus tendencies of liberal Christianity, Christian fundamentalists were actively pushing in a dual-focus direction. Southern Baptist hymnals regularly make Jesus into a lover and the process of conversion into a marriage. The Watchtower and other pamphlets distributed by Jehovah’s Witnesses lay a heavy stress on apocalyptic material. Today’s Christianity is clearly divided into two camps, opposed by their values and the Bible books that they stress. Where liberal Christians treat Christ as a teacher and model, evangelical Christians concentrate on his role as saviour. Fundamentalists also find a welcome model in an Old Testament God adept at separating the faithful from the faithless. The fundamentalist Bible is primarily constructed from selected Old Testament quotations (stressing the separation of the elect from their foes), Apocalypse (emphasizing future division of the world into the righteous and the sinners), and a carefully selected set of Gospel verses (accentuating the distinction between those received by Christ with open arms and those whom he rejects). Like Orthodox Judaism, fundamentalist Christianity dwells on the basic dual-focus principles of separation and distinction. The Bible championed by Protestant reformers and adopted by liberal Christians looks quite different. While it does not entirely turn its back on the Old Testament (in particular, adopting the Adam and Eve story and the Psalms, which both reveal single-focus proclivities), it concentrates heavily on Jesus’ parables and the Pauline epistles. Apocalyptic material, from whichever Testament, is left almost entirely aside by this group.
Like the dual-focus texts on which it depends, evangelical Christianity deals in publicly acknowledged absolutes. One is either a “born again” Christian or not—there is no in-between. The process of “finding Christ” must be celebrated by a public event modeled on a conversion experience (like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, which instantly transforms a Jewish youth from outsider to part of the minyan required to conduct a communal religious service). There are no gradations in the process, only a complete reversal from being “lost” to being “saved.” The liberal Christian approach to the same questions draws its inspiration instead from the single-focus system. Rather than a public once-and-for-all either/or affair, religion is a personal question, dependent on individual decisions that are subject to constant modification.
Just as religions may be understood through their commitments to differing narrative modes, so politicians typically evoke familiar narrative traditions in order to clarify their positions. While virtually any political figure might be chosen as an example, one elected official stands out for the clarity and force of his narrative commitments. Rarely has a head of state called more regularly and forthrightly on the dual-focus tradition than President George W. Bush. Already inclined by his evangelical religious training toward dual-focus formulations, Bush found in the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, all the justification he needed to increase the dual-focus nature of his rhetoric. Bush represents the world as fundamentally and permanently divided in two. On one side are the righteous, our allies. On the other side lies the “axis of evil”—Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and “terrorists” everywhere. At times, even American citizens who don’t share the president’s opinions would seem to be included in this group. Extending a long dual-focus tradition, these enemies are treated as a single undifferentiable block that is permanently aligned against “our” side. Conservative members of the clergy have not hesitated to declare their support for Bush’s policies from the pulpit, justifying the war with Iraq by associating Saddam Hussein with the Old Testament’s archetypally evil head of state King Nebuchadnezzar, whose siege and destruction of Jerusalem are reported in 2 Kings 24–25 (Marsh 2006:6). Dividing the world permanently in two, Bush and his supporters repeatedly invoke the dual-focus narrative tradition—not just its principles but even its traditional actors.
Unlike the liberal establishment, which sees the justice system as a way to guarantee individual liberties for all, the Bush government devised methods of administering justice differentially, according to the category into which it places individuals by prior judgment. While American citizens are technically guaranteed protection by the courts, those suspected of terrorism have not been allowed access to the normal justice system. When, in early 2006, a United Nations report called on the United States to close its Guantanamo Bay prison, White House spokesman Scott McClellan insisted that the prisoners cannot be released because “these are dangerous terrorists that we’re talking about” (Associated Press 2006:10A). According to the Bush government, these untried prisoners would commit or contribute to acts of terror. In other words, they have already been judged, and on that basis are denied the right to a swift trial.
While several political points deserve to be made apropos of the government’s Guantanamo Bay justice system, I am more concerned here to show that the politics of George W. Bush and his government may conveniently be defined, described, and understood through the notion of dual-focus narrative. The assumptions that drive Bush’s actions—and the government’s prose—are determined by a set of texts and a system of narrative that are fundamentally dual-focus in nature. Not only is Bush’s world permanently fixed in a we/they orientation, but also his assumptions about the unchanging nature of human character recycle familiar dual-focus epic material. Like the pagans of The Song of Roland, the terrorists in Bush’s narratives are a known quantity, their actions entirely predictable from what is represented as their mistaken allegiance. Where once the eminently single-focus category of decisions was the government’s major concern, now attention is concentrated on the fundamentally dual-focus category of borders. Whether at the level of national governments, financial investors, or personal friends, Bush clearly differentiates between an in-group and an out-group, forever separate. While this dual-focus approach has the advantage of circling the wagons and establishing a coherent community, it risks squelching the individual liberties and responsibilities on which American life has long been based.
Applicable wherever humans tell stories or implicitly refer to previously told tales, the theory presented in this volume offers powerful potential for describing human activities. In this final conclusion, I suggest how the theory might be used to image and explain such varied phenomena as individual texts, literary and film history, social organization, religion, and political life. Many other domains might have been evoked. Whether the topic is literature, art, or epistemology, we regularly find a historical series that may be usefully described as developing from dual-focus through single-focus to multiple-focus. Sometimes this pattern is most visible from a distance, as in the progression of Western art from sacred to profane to analytical, or the development of dominant medieval literary modes from dual-focus epic to single-focus romance to interlaced multiple-focus romance. Sometimes the dual-/single-/multiple-focus succession may be seen in the smallest of details, as in the history of the way people have identified themselves—from a patronymic or location-based family name, to a first name or nickname based on personal accomplishment or eccentricity, to a Social Security number or location defined by GPS coordinates.
Strong internal relationships among the three narrative modes (single-focus critiquing dual-focus, multiple-focus in turn undermining single-focus) suggest that the dual-/single-/multiple-focus sequence might be considered a master key to Western culture. Certainly, the general development of dual-focus to single-focus to multiple-focus literature does indeed map clearly onto the progression from medieval culture (where people are defined by feudal or religious ties), to early modern society (establishing individual worth through Reformation, revolutions, and romanticism), to the modern world (ushered in by sociology and cubism). In spite of the general usefulness of such overviews, however, they remain all too approximate. Fortunately, the focal theory presented here offers the wherewithal to provide greater accuracy. Though we can easily see the opposition between two cities in Augustine’s City of God as the very type of medieval dual-focus discourse, we also observe the extent to which Augustine’s Confessions offer a way out of the dual-focus worldview, as do the many saints’ lives that eventually provided a narrative model for single-focus romance. Though interlaced romance was initially developed during the thirteenth century as a multiple-focus critique of single-focus solutions, it is useful to note that the late Renaissance growth of single-focus tales (picaresque stories, Don Quixote, La Princesse de Clèves), eventually resulting in the invention of the novel, simply reversed that pattern, simultaneously critiquing and reorganizing multiple-focus material and strategies. Whatever the object or level of analysis, the approach presented in this book offers useful analytical resources.
One last foray. If medieval physics clearly grows out of dual-focus assumptions, and its Newtonian successor develops a fundamentally single-focus cause-and-effect model, then we may perhaps recognize in Einstein’s famous equation e = mc2 the ultimate multiple-focus hem-naming process, recognizing for the first time that energy and matter can be treated as equals. When energy and matter, action and character, are reduced to the same entity, can the end of narrative be far behind?