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M.E.G.-03British Novel

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given in the Assignments. These Sample Answers/Solutions are prepared by Tutor for the help of the studentto get an idea of how he/she can answer the questions of the Assignments. Sample answers may be Seen asthe Guide/Reference Book/Assignment Guide. Any Omission or Error is highly regretted though every carehas been taken while preparing these Sample Answers/Solutions. Please consult you Teacher / Tutor beforeyou prepare a Particular Answer.

Q. 1. Trace the development of modern English fiction with specific reference tothe major shifts in literary perspective during the 19th century.

Ans. Modern English fiction exploded the long-preserved myth of universal human nature.It accepted the change from pre-industrial way of life and economy. The modern Englishfiction was influenced by urbanisation, destruction of reason, and the resultant uncertaintiesof the First World-War. These aspects of life loomed large in the consciousness of the writ-ers, their workers reflected apocalyptic, risis-centred views of history. Literature reflected thesense of bleakness, alienation, disintegration, futility and sarchy that had engulfed the humanthinking. The result was that undertones of exreme-consciousness, introversion and scepti-cism entered into writing. Elments of the antirepresetnational came to the fore as poetryrevelled inverse libre of free verse and the novel took to the stream of consciousness narra-tive.

W.H. Auden called the period after Second World-War The age of anxiety.The realititiesof the battlefield imprinted themselves on the thinking of human beings who had, to come toterms with the height-marish destruction and desolation of nuclear bomb, widespread mas-sacres, new boarders and fallen regimes. With the death of literary giants like James Joyee,Virginia World and W.B. Yeats, a new strain of liberalism was born. The Liberal Imagina-tion (1950) by Lionel Thrilling called for moral realism that would embody the tragic sense folife would embody the tragic sense of life that literature should relfect.

The possibility of sensitive expression of human scepticism lay in the fiction. It was higherthan politics anddeeper than report. Literature saw the world in its human multipilicy, andvariety. It was capable of portraying the contradiction and ambiguity that lay beyond ideologyand certainity. The variability of human nature was one aspect of this strain. Novels dealt withagains the characterisitcs backdrop of the working or lower middle-class. The main charac-ters moved along in life filled with a deep sense of estrangement and surrounded with serveremental pain.

Novelists possessed a strange sense of aimlessness. It stopped them from understand-ing reasons for their esistence. "Theature of the Absurd" by Samuel Beckett went a long wayin reinforcing this tendency.

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It revolutionised trends in the writing of that period What cannot be expressed in finiteterms of number and quality is known as 'Surd' in mathematics. This type of feeling as refelectedin the literature of this period. At this stage, realism was no longer a leliable thing.

Modernism in literature reveals a breaking away from established patterns, traditions andconventions, which tries to offer fresh perspectives of the human beings position and func-tion in the universe. It was an experiment both in form and style.

Postmodernism reflects symbols of authority and adopts and electic approach. Tech-niques like expressing randon, unaccountable experiences are there which imitativeunderstones. The element of chance plays a significant role in it. Postmodernism appear inthe form of Noveau-Roman and the anti-novel. Plot, action, narration, and analysis of char-acter are often seen to be irrelevent. The novel is treated to be a medium that depicts theindividual verson and vision of things. James Joyee, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust and SamuelBackelt are post-war writers in this regard.

In the anti-novel trend, a sustained plot was not to be seen. It was charactrised by detailedanalysis of objects, many repetitions of the time sequence, arousing sexual desire, the novelof 1950 was experimental and had shares of anti-ideological and the realistic. The novelistsamde social happenings the theme of their novel.

Q. 2. Would it be correct to say that in Tom Jones, Fielding considers marriage tobe a mere socio-economic arrangement under which women feel continuously sup-pressed? Discuss.

Ans. Fielding very consummately gives Prefatory on Introductory chapters at the start ofeach book in Tom Jones. His such chapters are like the chorus in a Greek comedy. They givea dramatic tinge to the novel and act as dramatic prologues. Fielding himself says, ....It hathbeen usual with the honest and well meaning host to provide a bill of fare which all personsmay peruse at their first entrance into the house; and having thence acquainted them-selves with the entertainment which they may expect, may either stay and regale with whatis provided for them, or may depart to some other ordinary better accommodated to theirtaste. As we do not disdain to borrow wit or wisdom from any man who is capable of lendingus either, we have condescended to take a hint from these honest victuallers, and shallprefix not only a general bill of fare to our whole entertainment, but shall likewise give thereader particular bills to every course which is to be served up in this and the ensuingvolumes.

(Book I, Chapter 1)Richardson had used the Epistle method to write his novels. Fielding uses the method of

Introductory or Prefatory essays. This seems to be a justified method and a step higher thanRichardsons.

Moreover, Fieldings way of taking the reader into his confidence further enhances thejustness of the chapters. Fieldings sincerity and integrity as well as realism become quiteevident in these chapters when a good spade work for study is done through various theories.

To understand the utility of these chapters, we need read just the following two excerptsThe provision then, which we have here made is no other than Human Nature ....

We shall represent Human Nature at first to the keen appetite of our reader in that more

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plain and simple manner in which is found in the country, and shall hereafter hash andragout it with all the high French and Italian seasoning of affectation and vice which courtsand cities afford.

(Tom Jones, Book I, Chapter I)We should try to understand that Fielding lived and wrote in the age which is called The

Age of Pope or the Augustan Age. In that age by nature, it was meant human nature.(Fielding mentions human nature her explicitly.)

It means Fieldings avowed aim was to represent human nature (with all its vices andvirtues) and this, indeed, was the aim of Pope and even Addison and Steele, though theyapplied methods slightly different from one another. But all of them had to make use of humour,irony and satire in varying degrees to castigate sin and vice and reward virtue. While swiftwas bitterly satire and even cynical and misanthropic, and Addison and Steele were gentleand polite. Pope and Fielding were occupied the middle point, though, it must be admitted,Fielding was more humorous and realistic, but less witty and satiric than Pope, but not maliciousat all. The following comments on the critic seem quite apt

The critic, rightly considered, is no more than the clerk, whose office it is to transcribethe rules and lines laid down by those great judges whose vast strength of genius hath placedthem in the light of legislators, in the several sciences over which they presided. This officewas all which the critics of old aspired to, nor did they ever dare to advance a sentencewithout supporting it by the authority of the judge from whence it was borrowed. But in processof time, and in ages of ignorance, the clerk began to invade the power and assume thedignity of his master.

The laws of writing were no longer founded on the practice of the author, but on thedictates of the critic. The clerk became the legislator and those very peremptorily gavelaws whose business was, at first, only to transcribe them. Hence, arose an obvious, andperhaps an unavoidable error; for these critics being men of shallow capacities, veryeasily mistook mere form for substance.

Q. 3. Discuss the metaphor of the web in the context of events and people relat-ing to Bulstrode in Middlemarch.

Ans. Many readers may just regard Bulstrode the villain of the piece. That may be true asit goes, but it is certainly a hasty judgement. Bulstrode is neither a thorough going villain likeFagin nor a simple Dickensian hypocrite like Uriah Heep, or Pecksniff.

George Eliot is in no hurry to draw his character and even upto the end of the novel we donot get a full description of him except for certain traits of his character. All the same, we haveto assure that he is an essential character in the novel, without whom much of the charm of thestory will be lost.

In Chapter 13, he is described in the following mannerMr. Bulstrode perhaps liked him (Lydgate) The better for the differences between them

in pitch and manners; he certainly liked him the better, as Rosamond did, for being a strangerin Middlemarch. One can begin so many things with a new person !even begin to be a betterman.

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The authoress does not seem to be quite hospitable to him when she says about him To point out to other peoples errors was a duty Mr. Bulstrode rarely shrank from .....

We get a true inkling of his character from the epigraph of Chapter 61Inconsistencies .... cannot both be right, but imputed to man they may both be true.Thus Bulstrode leads a double lifeone of the religio-piety and the other of a sort of

shady dealings. According to the former kind of life, he ruins along with others a charitablehospital where Lydgate is an honorary physician.

As regards the second type of life, Bulstrode deals in stolen goods and its fact is notknown even to his wife.

It is Mr. Raffles who discloses Bulstrodes past life and shady dealings. It may be just achance that Raffles falls ill due to alcoholic poisoning and Lydgate is consulted.

Lydgate, in all sincerity, prescribes the cessation of the doses of opium at a later stagewhich he had ordered at the earlier stage and also forbids alcoholic to Raffles whose conditionis serious.

There is no doubt that Bulstrode who is attending on Mr. Raffles keeps back from thehousekeeper doctors directions that opium should not longer be served to the patient and onthis count is liable to be faulted.

However, what about the second direction of Lydgate? It is that alcohol should not beserved tothe patient. Bulstrode, of course, does not intend to violate this direction. But the housekeeperpleads with him

If you please, Sir, should I have no brandy nor nothing to give the poor creature..... WhenI nursed my poor master, Mr. Robinson, I had to give him port wine and brandy constant, a bigglass at a time.

Mr. Bulstrode tries to ignore the housekeepers pleadings, but he is accused of being amiser by the housekeeper

It is no time to spare when people are at deaths door, nor would you wish it, Sir, Imsure. Else I should give him our own bottle of rum as we keep by us.

Bulstrode succumbs to the stingy pressure and allows alcohol which hastens Rafflessdeath. Thus, even though Raffles who had exposed his shady deals might have been anobject desired to be got rid of by Bulstrode, the latter must not be solely held responsible forthe happening. But this is how the matter was taken and it changed into a scandal.

In a highly psychological way, George Eliot, in Chapter 71, talks of the susceptible nerveof a man whose intense being lay in such mastery and predominance as the conditions of hislife had shaped for him.

We can, without inconvenience deduce that Bulstrode was only human, neither a God,nor a demon, may be, we can say, a human being on the lower plane of life. Thus, both kindsof his life that of religio-charitable kind and the shady one are true.

George Eliot herself tells us in Chapter 61 that he was no duping hypocrite. He wassimply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs and who had graduallyexplained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs.

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The idea that Bulstrode is not a hypocrite, is further confirmed from the fact even in hisprayers he said, Though knowest how loose my soul sits from these thingshow I view themall as implements from tilling. Thy garden rescued here and there from the wilderness.

Bulstrode is certainly unaware of self-delusion, concerning his qualms of conscience.He prays to God with a truly religious heart

Thy will be done !As far as his shady deals in stolen goods and manufacture of the inferior quality of the

dyes made in the brassing manufacturing are concerned, he probably regards such mattersas a part of business, just into the bargain.

In the meeting in Middlemarch not only his shady deals, but also his loan for 1000 givento Lydgate quickly come into focus and he is accused of being no longer fit to sit in the house.

The whole matter takes the shape of a scandal. He tries to defends himself saying,Who shall be my accuser ? Not men whose own lives are unchristian, may scandalous

not men who themselves use low instruments to carry out their ends. Who have been spendingtheir income on their own sensual enjoyments, while I have been devoting mine to advancethe best objects with regard to this life and the next.

The epigraph of Chapter 85 which is taken from The Pilgrims Progress brings on thesurface every mans tendency to sin.

Thus, Bulstrode, though certainly a committer of some crime, petty or otherwise, is neithera hardened villain or criminal nor a crass hypocrite. His conduct is certainly within the range ofhumanity, may be, on the lower plane. It is a pity that Mr. Lydgate had also to suffer along withhim and not even his wife stood by him in his hour of need. But is unquestionable power in thenovel Middlemarch and his dauntlessness till the end, and least at least, deserve some creditmarks.

Q. 4. Suggest the political and artistic implications of placing the conclusion ofPassage to India within the Orientalist paradigm.

Ans. (i) Mr. E K. Brown has described A Passage to India as a singing in the hall offiction.

(ii) The novel A Passage to India has a scriptativestructure(1) Mosque (2) Caves (3) Temple(b) They may be characterized respectively as :(1) Thesis; (2) Antithesis; (3) Synthesis (or Reconciliation).(c) Thus, the novel has a Dialectic structure (that is, it is based on the generalized principle

of general laws movement and development of nature and thought).(iii) The meaningful scenery of Chandrapore acts as the prologue to the novel.(d) It means that even if the central principle (Caves) in the novel is negation, yet because

of the positivity of multiplied negatives, the net value results in positivity (Reconciliation) whichis close Temple to Thesis (Mosque).

(iv) Thus Temple section which is sometimes considered redundant, acts as not onlyas synthesis or reconciliation, but also as an Epilogue and hence Forster himself says thatit was architecturally necessary

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It was architecturally necessary. I needed a lump, or a Hindu temple if you like a mountainstanding up. It is well placed; and it gathers up some strings. But there ought to be more afterit. The lump sticks out a little too much ....

(v) Forster says about the pattern or theaesthetic sense in a novel as underBut whereas the story appeals to our curiosity and the plot to our intellingence, the pattern

appeals to our aesthetic sense, it causes us to see the book as a whole. We do not see it asan hour-glass-that is the hard jargon of the lecture room which must never be taken literally atthin advanced stage of our inquiry. We just have a pleasure without knowing why, and whenthe pleasure is past, as it is now, and our minds are left free to explain it, a geometrical similesuch as an hour-glass will be found helpful. If it was not for this hour-glass the story, the plot,and the characters of this and Paphance would none of them exert their full force they wouldnone of them breathe as they do.

Pattern, which seems so rigid, is connected with atmosphere, which seems so fluid.Thus, section III begins with the description of a crowd chanting Tukaram, Tukaram.(vi) We have the following significant lines in Chapter 33 with which section III startsMurio there was but from as many sources that the sum total was untrammelled. The

braying, banging crooning melted into a single mass which trailed round the palace beforejoining the Thunder.

(vii) Thus, Rhythm is concerned not so much with the external form as with the internaldesign of the work, that is, with its texture.

(viii) About pattern Forster himself says, Beauty is sometimes the shape of the book.(x) According to E.K. Brown, Three big blocks of soundthat was Forsters account of

rhythm in the Fifth Symphony. Three big blocks of soundthat is what A Passage to Indiaconsists of. A first block in which evil creeps about weakly, and the secret understanding ofthe heart is easily dominant. A second block very long, and very dark, in which evil streamsforth from the caves and lays waste almost everything about, but yet meets an opposition,indecisive in some ways, but unyielding, in the contemplative insight of Professor Godbole,and in the intuitive fidelity of Mrs. Moore. A third block in which evil is forced to recede,summarily, and spectacularly, not by the secret understanding of the heart, but they strengthon which the secret understanding of the heart depends, contemplative insight, intuitive fidelity.Then the final reminder, that good has merely obliged evil to recede as good recede beforeevil a little before.

Reduced to the barest terms, the structure of A Passage to India has the rhythmic rise-fall-rise that Forster found in what has been for him, early and late, the greatest of novels, Warand Peace.

Beethovans Fifth Symphony is pertinent in the sense that it is heard when the playing ofmusic has already stopped.

(x) According to Lord David Cecil, Forsters is not the grand style, but it has other meritsNot in any sense it is a grand style; there is no eloquence and burning passion in it. But

it is infinitely sensitive, infinitely dexterous, infinitely graceful. In it, all his diverse qualities areto be seen deftly and fastidiously translated into his very choice of epithet, the very lilt and

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thmpo of his light tuneful unpredictable rhythms. Nor does complexity ever obscure beauty.Forster is like a dancer who can execute the most complicated steps easily and withoutmaking a single ugly movement.

(xi) In the opinion of Arnold Kettle, Forsters style lacks concrete artistic force; but hetoo thinks that it has other merits

Forster uses Mrs Moore and the Hindu theme to attempt to achieve a dimension ofwhich he feels the necessary, but for which his liberal agnosticism has no place. But becausehe is sceptical about the very material he is using, he fails to give the concrete artistic forcewhich alone could make it play an effective part in the novels pattern. Such passages as thetwelfth Chapter of the novel in which Hinduism is seen historically and a wonderful sense ofage and mutability is achieved by placing India geologically, are completely successful. Butwhen Forster attempts to give to Mrs. Moore a kind of significance which his own method hasalready undermined then the novel stumbles. The distinction between mystery and muddleitself becomes uneasy. The agnostic attempt to get the best of both words, to underminemysticism without rejecting it, lies behind the difficulty.

And yet the tentativeness, the humility of Forsters attitude is not something to undervalue.The perhapses that lie at the core of his novels, constantly pricking the facile generalization,hinting at the unpredictable element in the most fully analysed relationship cannot be brushedaside as mere liberal pusillanimity. He seems to me a writer of scrupulous intelligence, oftough and abiding insights, who has never been afraid of the big issues or the difficult onesand has scorned to hide doubts and weaknesses behind a facade of wordiness and self-protective conformity. His very vulnerability is a kind of strength.

(xii) However, in the opinion of another critic :After reading one of his packed, live iridescent pages, the work of most other authors

seems obvious and monotonous. For the concourse of so many streamsintelligence, fancy,observation, moral judgementall flowering swift and high, sets the whole shimmering andfoaming and frothing with an extra-ordinary and varied vitality. Every inch of surface iscontinously animated by the play of mind; hardly a sentence but gives us a little shock ofsurprise and interest. Each novel delights, for all the diverse elements are fused together incharming harmony by Forsters use of language.

(xiii) In the opinion of James Mc Conkey, A Passage to India is not only Forsters greatestnovel, but one of the outstanding literary accomplishments of the 20th century. In it, Forsterhas wedded the rhythmic devices of musicthe return again and again, with variations, of athememore perfectly to prose than he has ever managed before and he has even utilizedthat return itself (in the form of the echo) as one of the major expanding images of the novel.The novel achieves, more fully than any other he has written, the final expansion for which hehas always sought, the expansion which is the novel as a whole and which occurs within thereader after the novel has been finished. Such an expansion is produced by BeethovensFifth Symphony, we have earlier noted Forster as saying, mainly (though not entirely) by therelation between the three big blocks of sound which the orchestra has been playing. Thethree sections of A Passage to India correspond to three such blocks. E.K. Brown points out,the initial Chapter in each section serving to introduce the basic themes which are to follow.

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(xiv) Arnold Kettles view cannot be ignored when he says, E.M. Forster is not a writer ofthe stature of D.H. Lawrence as Joyce, but he is a fine and enduring artist and the only livingBritish novelist who can be discussed without fatuity against the highest and the broadeststandard.

(xv) K.W. Grandson examines the spiritual and moral aspects of the highly complex novelas A Passage to India is, with its intriable structure and unusual pattern, more attained tomusic then just an ordinary piece of fiction

A Passage to India seems to say the last word (not technically as Joyce seemed to) butspiritually, emotionally, morally : it drained a whole tradition to the dregs, and we are left withthe choice between contemplating an empty cup or refilling it again from the past. The novelposes infinite speculations. How far is Forster offeringand not just within the Indian frameworkof the storythe sacred contagion of Hinduism as a spiritual corrective to the limitations ofindividualism, an all inclusive salvation for a world doomed to fragmentation by its ownignorance and selfishness ? How far is the final message a despairing judgement on thethrust and assertiveness of western man since the Renaissance ? The terrifying insights ofthe caves, the joyous ones of the temple, seem to be put forward as not morally between butas more sensible than the constantly failing simplifications, the crude techniques of the will topower.

(xvi) Stuart Hampshire points out that An underlying argument, a division of allegiance,runs through all of Mrs Forsters writing and shapes the developing style and structure of hisnovels. Roughly stated, the division is between, on the one side, an inherited liberalismconfirmed among life-long friends at Cambridge and never altogether discarded whichstresses the authority of the individual conscience, and stressed also the qualities ofsensitiveness and lucidity in personal relations within the setting of a civilized private life. Onthe other side, Mr. Forster has always represented the natural order surrounding this littlecompound of cultivated ground as sublime, unknown, unlimited, and as not adopted to ourpowers of understanding. We cannot be safe and at home within the compound, howevermuch we may defensively pretend to be. The function of art is to take men outside the compoundof conscious awareness, beyond their moral anxieties, and to find expression for the deeperrhythms in nature from which we are otherwise disconnected.

(xvii) We can find a tinge of caution in dealing with moral vision as in Forster, for instancewhen the learned critic Lord Davi Cecil says, If that vision is incoherent, if those foundationsare insecure, so also is the building that rests on them. We move through it entranced thatuneasy; for we are, half unconsciously aware that at any moment the whole delicate structuremay come tumbling about our ears.

(xviii) We must not ignore Forsters own comments in the novel irrigated by his poeticvision as well as the comments which we get from certain renowned critics

(a) The word extraordinary seems to have been used in the novel in an ironic sense.(b) The word echo has been used ironically at placesIn the Bridge Party, we have the expression echoing walls of civility.(c) Even Godboles Come, come, come, come, seems to have been used ironically.

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(d) The very character of Godbole seems to be ironic in essence. Thus says, M.K. Naik: If Forster wished to project Godbole as a worthy representative of Hinduism, he could nothave chosen a worse representative.

(e) According to Middleton Murry : Forster doesnt understand his Hindu.(f) About Adela, Forster says, She would see Indian always as a freeze, never as a

spirit.(g) John Beer, however, believes that If the caves represent on extreme of India, its other

reality. And if the two extremes cannot quite meet, that does not mean that mankind ought toturn away from both and seek a compromise half-way between them. One is reminded againof the vehement assertion in Howards End : No, truth, being alive, was not half-way betweenanything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and thoughproportion is the final secrete, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility.

(h) Preulien A. Brower finds something deeper in the novel when he says, The echo,though less ambiguous than the other symbols, has a dual value for the reader. As an imagelinked with the reading arches of the sky and with Mrs. Moores glimpses of in monotonousmeaningless bou-oum the echo brings to the surface uglier levels of experience alreadyassociated with the Marabar and hinted at in the less sinister symbols of Mosque and sky.The vision turns out to be nightmare. Forsters success in making it so convincing and someaningful arises from his handling of a complex design which is at once dramatic, symbolicand ironic. As an artist he has earned the right to attribute large and various meanings to Mrs.Moores curious experience and to express a significance that goes well beyond the immediatedramatic moment. While presenting a seemingly personal crisis Forster has expressed thevision perhaps most characteristic of the twentieth century, the discovery that the universemay not be a unity but chaos, that older philosophic and religious orders with the values theyguaranteed have dissolved. The vision of A Passage to India has its counterparts in TheEducation of Henry Adams and in Gerontion and The Waste Land. All these visions arewithdiffering emphasesthe results of various kinds of over-exposure, to too many civilizations(which seem to make nonsense of oneanother), to too many observations of complexity inthe mind in the physical world

After such knowledge, what forgiveness ?(i) The all out indictment of the Englishmen and likewise presentation of pettiness among

the Indians to such an extent seems to be in the ironic strain says Lionel TrillingForsters gallery of English officials has, of course, been dispute in England, there have

been many to say that the English are not like that. Even without knowledge we must supposethat the Indian Civil Service has its quota of decent, devoted and humble officials. But ifForsters portraits are perhaps angry exaggerations, anger can be illuminatingthe Englishof Forsters Chandrapore are the limits towards which the English in India must approach, forLord Acton was right, power does corrupt, absolute power does corrupt absolutely.

As for the representation for the Indians, that too can be judged here only on prior grounds.Although the Indians are conceived in sympathy and affection, they are conceived with theseemotions alone, and although all of them have charm, none of them has dignity, they touch our

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hearts but they never impress us. Once, at his vindication feast, Aziz is represented as full ofcivilization .... complete, dignified, rather hard and for the first time Fielding treats him withdiffidence but this only serves to show us how lacking in dignity Aziz usually is. Very possiblythis is the effect that Indians make upon even sensitive Westerners: Dickinson, as we haveseen, was bored by them, and generations of subjection can diminish the habits of dignityand teach grown men the strategy of little child.

(j) Even if we feel any indictment of Forster by Trilling for not representing the English andthe Indians truly, we have to be sure that Forster could be ironic, in this sense, at least byexaggerating and by resorting to the Dickinson art of caricature to a certain degree, thoughDickens lay stress more on characters as individuals than on individuals as members of arace with a distinct and particular culture as Forster does :

Thus, says Trilling further :These are not matters that we can settle, that they should have arisen at all is no doubt

a fault of the novel. Quite apart from the fact that questions of verisimilitude diminish illusion,they indicate a certain inadequacy in the conception of the story. To represent the officialEnglish as so unremittingly bad and the Indians as so unremittingly feeble is to prevent thestory from being sufficiently worked out in terms of the characters : the characters, that is, arein the events, the events are not in them : We want a large Englishman that Fielding, a weightierIndian than Aziz.

(k) To be sure, even though Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair is a much more lively and livingcharacter than any of Forsters probably in any of his novels, yet even Thackeray had toexaggerate to some extent to drive home his point.

(l) There is explicitly satirical irony in the meeting between Fielding and Adela, as Forstersays about it

A friendliness as of dwarfs shaking hands was in the air. Both man and woman were atthe height of their powerssensible, honest, even subtle. They spoke the same language,and held some opinions, and the variety of age and sex did not divide them. Yet they weredissatisfied. When they agreed, I want to go on living a bit, or, I dont believe in God, thewords were followed by a curious backwash as though the universe had displaced itself to fillup a tiny void, or though they had seen their own gestures from an immense heightdwarfstalking, shaking hands and assuring each-other that they stored on the same footing of insight.

(m) According to Frederick C. Crew, with A Passage to India, Forsters career as anartist comes to an end and with comes the end of the traditional novel as he found it.

It is perhaps significant that Forsters career as a novelist comes to an apparent end atthis moment of development, for the characters of a novel, as he has said elsewhere, Suggesta more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race ; they give us the illusionof perspicacity and power. A Passage to India, though it tells us more about its charactersthan they themselves know, tries to refute the very thought that our race is comprehensibleand manageable; it casts doubt upon the claim of anyone, even of the artist, to supply the fullcontext of human action. In writing one novel which pays full deference to the unknown and theunknowable. Forster thus seems to announce the end of the traditional novel as he found it;between pathetic futility and absolute mystery no middle ground remains for significant action.

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(n) We see that even in A Passage to India, the importance of character and plot hasbeen minimised. Thereafter, the novel takes entirely different shapes, as it becomes highlypsychological, introvertial, till it reaches the dead end of decay of the story, plot and character,and so on.

It is, indeed a deft ironic device that when Krishna is being called to Come, come,come, come, What comes instead in the sun in April, the source of life and of Marbar ; andthe sun spreads not love but lust and muddle. Or, instead of Krishna, a British magistratearrives : He comes, he comes, he comes, says a satirical Indian. The lack of this coming isfelt by the guests at the party who hear Godboles song; they are unwell, with some malaise ofprivation ; they are suffering from a deficiency of meaning, which cannot be cured until lovetakes upon itself the form of Krishna and saves the world in the rain. The unity he makes in animage of art ; for a moment at least all in one, apprehensible by love; nothing is excepted orextraordinary. The novel itself assumes a similar unity, becomes a mystery, revelation ofwholeness; and does so without disturbing the story or the parable ....

....We cannot know too much about the remarkable inclusiveness of the book. Wecontinue to have our illusions of order and clever faking ; but this book reminds us how vastthe effort for totality must be : nothing is excepted, the extraordinary is essential to order. Thecities of muddle, the echoes of disorder, the excepting and the excepted, are all to mademeaningful in being made one. This will not happen without the truth of imagination which Mr.Forster calls love: love cheats, and muddle turns into mystery into art, our one orderly product.

Commenting on Forsters use of Rhythm and Pattern in A Passage to India, Peter Burrasays

This, then, is what gives to the raw material of his stories such distinctionthe qualitywhich he comprehensively calls Rhythm, which means the use of left-motif phrases and imagesto link up separated parts, with the additional function of dramatic irony and symbolism. Thisit is which gives pattern to the most diffuse of all forms. The deviceof motifs, irony, andsymbolsis, in fact, the modern equivalent of the classical unities, an invention of the greatestvalue, having, all the classical advantages and none of their so severe limitations.

Lionel Trilling finds certain faults in the plot construction in A Passage to India, but saysthat Forster was able to transcend and even put them to use

These faults, it is true, and Forster is the one novelist who could commit them and yettranscend and even put them to use. The relation of the characters to the events, for example,is the result severe imbalance in the relation of plot to story. Plot and story in this novel are notcoextensive as they are in all Forsters other novels. The plot is precise, hard, crystallized andfar simpler than any Forster has previously conceived. The story is beneath and above theplot and continues beyond it in time. It is, to be sure, created by the plot, it is the plots manifoldreverberation, but it is greater than the plot and contains it. The plot is as decisive as a ajudicial opinion, the story is an impulse, a tendency, a perception. The suspension of not inthe large circumambient sphere of story, the expansion of the story from the centre of plot,requires some of the subtlest manipulation that any novel has ever had. This relation of plotand story tells us that we are dealing with a political novel of an unusual kind. The characters

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are of sufficient size for the plot, they are not large enough for the storyand that indeed is thepoint of the story.

Forster himself says in Aspects of the NovelWe need a vantage post, for the novel is aformidable mass, and it is so amorphousno mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon,not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literatureirrigated byhundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp.

It will be worthwhile to study at some length Forsters reaction to Aristotelian concept ofthe plot as envisaged in his Aspects of the Novel

Character, says Aristotle, gives us qualities, but it is in actionswhat we dothat weare happy or the reverse. have already decided that Aristotle is wrong and now we must facethe consequences of disgracing with him. All human happiness and misery, says Aristotle,take the form of action. We know better. We believe that happiness and misery exist in thesecret life, which each of us leads privately and to which (in his characters) the novelist hasaccess. And by the secret life we mean the life for which there is no external evidence, not, asin vulgarly supposed, that which is revealed by a chance, word or a sign. A chance, word orsign are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder : the life they reveal ceases to besecret and enters the realm of action.

There is, however, no occasion to be hard on Aristotle. He had read few novels and nomodern onesthe Odyssey but not Ulysseshe was by temperament apathetic to secrecy,and indeed regard the human mind as a sort of tub from which everything can finally beextracted; and when he wrote the words quoted above he had in view the drama, where nodoubt they hold true. In the drama all human happiness and misery does and must take theform of action. Otherwise its existence remains unknown, and this in the great differencebetween drama and the novel.

Q. 5. How does Realism find expression in British fiction of the 1960s? Base youranswer on your understanding of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Ans. Politics was replaced by a greater concentration on some religious and moral is-sues after the first great war. Miss Spark has touched upon both an in Miss Sandy and MissBoddie diverse threads of Christanity in her novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Theattitude of students is releated to Roman Catholicism, where as tideolgy of her student isrelated to calvinism. In order to understand the divergent views, we shall first concetnrate onthe doctrines expounded by Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Knox know to differentiatetheir views from the doctrines of the Roman Cathlic Church, The Christian Church at Romewas founded by the chief apostle of Christ. St. Peter. The Bishop of Rome have then onwardhaveclaimed for their office a direct succession from St. Peter. The Pope of Rome is the religioushead of the Roman Catholic Church. Its residence is in the Vatican City at Rome.

According to the Church, its teachings are infallible. There cannot be any error in theteaching of the Pope. When the Pope speaks is his apostolic capacity he always makes apronouncement in matters of faith and morals.

The birth of protestanitism akrs the breakway from the Roman Catholic Church. In Eu-rope, it took place in sixteen century. Martin Luther , a miners son in Germany became a

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priest and preached against the granting of indulgences by the Pope. These indulgenceswere certificates of pardon sold for money by the Pope to pardon the worng actions of buy-ers. Martin Luther drew attention of educated people of the society by nailing a protest to theChurch in Witemburg. The Church in Rome condemened him as heretic and excommuni-cated. Martin Luther was intelligent enough to realise that the could not rreform the existingCatholic Church. In 1530, he formulated the basic of a new Church. In 1530, he formulated thebasis of a new doctrine that broke away from Roman Catholicism. the reformation movementreached England in 1934 when King Henry VIII served relations with the Pope of Rome anddeclared himself head of the Church of England. It got a firm base during the reign of QueenElizabeth I.

Martin Luther influenced, John Calvin, a Swiss religious reformer, greatly. His teachingwas the code of simplicity and austerity. He urged the masses to follow these codes in day today life and Chruch ritual, Calvinism is against the free wil of individuals and look througheverything as predetermined.

Calvonistic from the protestantism was furthered by John Knox. He got success in 1560,when by the Treaty of Edingburgh, authority of the Pope of Rome was abolished in Scotlandand replaced by Calvinistic confession of faith. This faith was drawn by Knox with the help ofthe colleagues.

The religious learnings of Miss Brodie are clearly Calvinistic. She disaproves the Churchof Rome and terms it to be the "Church of Supersition", and firmly belives that "only peoplewho did not thing for themselves were Roman Catholies. She distances hderself from theRoman Catholic Church and becomes. "the God of Calvin-Who sees the beginnings andthe end" She believes that God is omipotent and sets about ordering her own life and alsothat of others. Her total lack of guilt in assuming this bluers her moral perceptions. "She wasnot" writes Spark, in any doubut, she let everyone knows she was in no doubt, that God wason her, side whatever her course and she experienced no difficulty or sense of hypocrisy inworkship and at the same time, she went to bed with sining master. The sense of isolationand alientation that she encountered at the end of her life was brought an by a weaknedsense of morality.

The attitudes of Miss Brodie towards education are also releated to Calvinism. Like CalvinsGod, she holds way over the Brodie Set and expects from each of them to fulfill her expecta-tions at each step of their lives. For this, she adopts a psychological approach. Wh protraysherself to her students as a victim of the system that come in between her high ideals. MissBrodie seeks to assure her students of an academic salvation by promosing to turn theminto the creme de la creme among their friends provided they follow her advice in wordsand letters. She got confidence of six girls and started about planning and organising theirfutures for them she sees potential of fulfilling her dream in Rose and Sandy. Miss BrodieSparks write in her novel. The Prime of Miss Brodie that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with herinstinct to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyeds lover, and Sandy with her insight to act asinformant on the affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy hand been chosen as thecreme da la creme She feels rudely shocked when just the opposite happens.

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Miss Brodie does not live on any theory, but personal experience and insight. Spark sug-gests that the Catholic Church was a suitable channel for normalising her. Had Miss Brodielived within the limits of doctrine and community, whe might have been saved from the pitfallsof personal judgement. Whe could have made use of her energy in better directions of lifethan wasting her faculties to set explosive ideas in the minds of her followers. When Sandysees throug the effect of Miss Brodies imposition of her ideology and enthusiasm, she un-derstands the evel designs of her mentor. She feels perturbed by the images on Lloydscanvases where all the girls appear to resemble Miss Brodie. She is alarmed to hear of thecircumstances of Emily Joyees death. Sandy senses that Miss Brodie has elected herselfto grace and saw her as a symbol of power that ruled over the lives of smaller people MissBrodies, self-righteousness and absense of humility makes Sandy uncomformtable wh seesan excessive lack of guilt in her teacher. Later on Sany read John Calvin, and found it difficultto see eye to eye to his dcotrine in which the human soluld was ensalved to sin and givepeople and enoromous sense of joy and salvation so that their surprise at the end might benastier Calvinisms deterministic approach is not accepted by Sandy in favour of the moreredemptive Roman Catholicism. She present the picture of Miss Brodie as a Calvinisticpresence designing and determining the future of innocent minds and decides to stop it. Sheis successful in her objective, but she feels herslef guilty which makes her life uncomfortable,Miss Spark however, sympathises with Sandy. When she recovers from her sense of self-righteousness, she is able to understand that Miss Brodies sense of self righteousness andenlarging aspects had not been without its beneficient.

Muriel Spark does to accept the determinism of Calvin and Knock. Spark values seenignthe truth with sentiments. InThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie humbug and falsehood becametargets of her denunciation.