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M.E.G.-03

British Novel
ASSIGNMENT SOLUTIONS GUIDE (2013-2014)
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Q. 1. Trace the development of modern English fiction with specific reference to the 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 English fiction was influenced by urbanisation, destruction of reason, and the resultant uncertainties of the First World-War. These aspects of life loomed large in the consciousness of the writers, their workers reflected apocalyptic, risis-centred views of history. Literature reflected the sense of bleakness, alienation, disintegration, futility and sarchy that had engulfed the human thinking. The result was that undertones of exreme-consciousness, introversion and scepticism entered into writing. Elments of the antirepresetnational came to the fore as poetry revelled inverse libre of free verse and the novel took to the stream of consciousness narrative. W.H. Auden called the period after Second World-War The age of anxiety.The realitities of the battlefield imprinted themselves on the thinking of human beings who had, to come to terms with the height-marish destruction and desolation of nuclear bomb, widespread massacres, 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 Imagination (1950) by Lionel Thrilling called for moral realism that would embody the tragic sense fo life 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 higher than politics anddeeper than report. Literature saw the world in its human multipilicy, and variety. It was capable of portraying the contradiction and ambiguity that lay beyond ideology and certainity. The variability of human nature was one aspect of this strain. Novels dealt with agains the characterisitcs backdrop of the working or lower middle-class. The main characters moved along in life filled with a deep sense of estrangement and surrounded with servere mental pain. Novelists possessed a strange sense of aimlessness. It stopped them from understanding reasons for their esistence. "Theature of the Absurd" by Samuel Beckett went a long way in reinforcing this tendency.

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It revolutionised trends in the writing of that period What cannot be expressed in finite terms of number and quality is known as 'Surd' in mathematics. This type of feeling as refelected in 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 and conventions, which tries to offer fresh perspectives of the human beings position and function in the universe. It was an experiment both in form and style. Postmodernism reflects symbols of authority and adopts and electic approach. Techniques like expressing randon, unaccountable experiences are there which imitative understones. The element of chance plays a significant role in it. Postmodernism appear in the form of Noveau-Roman and the anti-novel. Plot, action, narration, and analysis of character are often seen to be irrelevent. The novel is treated to be a medium that depicts the individual verson and vision of things. James Joyee, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust and Samuel Backelt are post-war writers in this regard. In the anti-novel trend, a sustained plot was not to be seen. It was charactrised by detailed analysis of objects, many repetitions of the time sequence, arousing sexual desire, the novel of 1950 was experimental and had shares of anti-ideological and the realistic. The novelists amde social happenings the theme of their novel. Q. 2. Would it be correct to say that in Tom Jones, Fielding considers marriage to be a mere socio-economic arrangement under which women feel continuously suppressed? Discuss. Ans. Fielding very consummately gives Prefatory on Introductory chapters at the start of each book in Tom Jones. His such chapters are like the chorus in a Greek comedy. They give a dramatic tinge to the novel and act as dramatic prologues. Fielding himself says, ....It hath been usual with the honest and well meaning host to provide a bill of fare which all persons may peruse at their first entrance into the house; and having thence acquainted themselves with the entertainment which they may expect, may either stay and regale with what is provided for them, or may depart to some other ordinary better accommodated to their taste. As we do not disdain to borrow wit or wisdom from any man who is capable of lending us either, we have condescended to take a hint from these honest victuallers, and shall prefix not only a general bill of fare to our whole entertainment, but shall likewise give the reader particular bills to every course which is to be served up in this and the ensuing volumes. (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 than Richardsons. Moreover, Fieldings way of taking the reader into his confidence further enhances the justness of the chapters. Fieldings sincerity and integrity as well as realism become quite evident 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 excerpts The 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 and ragout it with all the high French and Italian seasoning of affectation and vice which courts and 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 and virtues) and this, indeed, was the aim of Pope and even Addison and Steele, though they applied 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 swift was bitterly satire and even cynical and misanthropic, and Addison and Steele were gentle and 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 malicious at 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 transcribe the rules and lines laid down by those great judges whose vast strength of genius hath placed them in the light of legislators, in the several sciences over which they presided. This office was all which the critics of old aspired to, nor did they ever dare to advance a sentence without supporting it by the authority of the judge from whence it was borrowed. But in process of time, and in ages of ignorance, the clerk began to invade the power and assume the dignity of his master. The laws of writing were no longer founded on the practice of the author, but on the dictates of the critic. The clerk became the legislator and those very peremptorily gave laws whose business was, at first, only to transcribe them. Hence, arose an obvious, and perhaps an unavoidable error; for these critics being men of shallow capacities, very easily mistook mere form for substance. Q. 3. Discuss the metaphor of the web in the context of events and people relating to Bulstrode in Middlemarch. Ans. Many readers may just regard Bulstrode the villain of the piece. That may be true as it goes, but it is certainly a hasty judgement. Bulstrode is neither a thorough going villain like Fagin 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 do not get a full description of him except for certain traits of his character. All the same, we have to assure that he is an essential character in the novel, without whom much of the charm of the story will be lost. In Chapter 13, he is described in the following manner Mr. 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 stranger in Middlemarch. One can begin so many things with a new person !even begin to be a better man.

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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 61 Inconsistencies .... 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 charitable hospital where Lydgate is an honorary physician. As regards the second type of life, Bulstrode deals in stolen goods and its fact is not known even to his wife. It is Mr. Raffles who discloses Bulstrodes past life and shady dealings. It may be just a chance 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 stage which he had ordered at the earlier stage and also forbids alcoholic to Raffles whose condition is serious. There is no doubt that Bulstrode who is attending on Mr. Raffles keeps back from the housekeeper doctors directions that opium should not longer be served to the patient and on this count is liable to be faulted. However, what about the second direction of Lydgate? It is that alcohol should not be served to the patient. Bulstrode, of course, does not intend to violate this direction. But the housekeeper pleads with him If you please, Sir, should I have no brandy nor nothing to give the poor creature..... When I nursed my poor master, Mr. Robinson, I had to give him port wine and brandy constant, a big glass at a time. Mr. Bulstrode tries to ignore the housekeepers pleadings, but he is accused of being a miser by the housekeeper It is no time to spare when people are at deaths door, nor would you wish it, Sir, Im sure. 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 Raffless death. Thus, even though Raffles who had exposed his shady deals might have been an object desired to be got rid of by Bulstrode, the latter must not be solely held responsible for the 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 nerve of a man whose intense being lay in such mastery and predominance as the conditions of his life 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 kinds of 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 was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs and who had gradually explained 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 his prayers he said, Though knowest how loose my soul sits from these thingshow I view them all 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 matters as a part of business, just into the bargain. In the meeting in Middlemarch not only his shady deals, but also his loan for 1000 given to 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 spending their income on their own sensual enjoyments, while I have been devoting mine to advance the best objects with regard to this life and the next. The epigraph of Chapter 85 which is taken from The Pilgrims Progress brings on the surface every mans tendency to sin. Thus, Bulstrode, though certainly a committer of some crime, petty or otherwise, is neither a hardened villain or criminal nor a crass hypocrite. His conduct is certainly within the range of humanity, may be, on the lower plane. It is a pity that Mr. Lydgate had also to suffer along with him and not even his wife stood by him in his hour of need. But is unquestionable power in the novel Middlemarch and his dauntlessness till the end, and least at least, deserve some credit marks. Q. 4. Suggest the political and artistic implications of placing the conclusion of Passage to India within the Orientalist paradigm. Ans. (i) Mr. E K. Brown has described A Passage to India as a singing in the hall of fiction. (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) which is close Temple to Thesis (Mosque). (iv) Thus Temple section which is sometimes considered redundant, acts as not only as synthesis or reconciliation, but also as an Epilogue and hence Forster himself says that it was architecturally necessary

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It was architecturally necessary. I needed a lump, or a Hindu temple if you like a mountain standing up. It is well placed; and it gathers up some strings. But there ought to be more after it. The lump sticks out a little too much .... (v) Forster says about the pattern or theaesthetic sense in a novel as under But 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 as an hour-glass-that is the hard jargon of the lecture room which must never be taken literally at thin advanced stage of our inquiry. We just have a pleasure without knowing why, and when the pleasure is past, as it is now, and our minds are left free to explain it, a geometrical simile such 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 would none 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 starts Murio 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 before joining the Thunder. (vii) Thus, Rhythm is concerned not so much with the external form as with the internal design 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 India consists of. A first block in which evil creeps about weakly, and the secret understanding of the heart is easily dominant. A second block very long, and very dark, in which evil streams forth 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 strength on 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 before evil a little before. Reduced to the barest terms, the structure of A Passage to India has the rhythmic risefall-rise that Forster found in what has been for him, early and late, the greatest of novels, War and Peace. Beethovans Fifth Symphony is pertinent in the sense that it is heard when the playing of music has already stopped. (x) According to Lord David Cecil, Forsters is not the grand style, but it has other merits Not 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 are to 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 without making a single ugly movement. (xi) In the opinion of Arnold Kettle, Forsters style lacks concrete artistic force; but he too thinks that it has other merits Forster uses Mrs Moore and the Hindu theme to attempt to achieve a dimension of which he feels the necessary, but for which his liberal agnosticism has no place. But because he is sceptical about the very material he is using, he fails to give the concrete artistic force which alone could make it play an effective part in the novels pattern. Such passages as the twelfth Chapter of the novel in which Hinduism is seen historically and a wonderful sense of age and mutability is achieved by placing India geologically, are completely successful. But when Forster attempts to give to Mrs. Moore a kind of significance which his own method has already undermined then the novel stumbles. The distinction between mystery and muddle itself becomes uneasy. The agnostic attempt to get the best of both words, to undermine mysticism 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 brushed aside as mere liberal pusillanimity. He seems to me a writer of scrupulous intelligence, of tough and abiding insights, who has never been afraid of the big issues or the difficult ones and has scorned to hide doubts and weaknesses behind a facade of wordiness and selfprotective 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 and foaming and frothing with an extra-ordinary and varied vitality. Every inch of surface is continously animated by the play of mind; hardly a sentence but gives us a little shock of surprise and interest. Each novel delights, for all the diverse elements are fused together in charming harmony by Forsters use of language. (xiii) In the opinion of James Mc Conkey, A Passage to India is not only Forsters greatest novel, but one of the outstanding literary accomplishments of the 20th century. In it, Forster has wedded the rhythmic devices of musicthe return again and again, with variations, of a thememore perfectly to prose than he has ever managed before and he has even utilized that 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 he has always sought, the expansion which is the novel as a whole and which occurs within the reader after the novel has been finished. Such an expansion is produced by Beethovens Fifth Symphony, we have earlier noted Forster as saying, mainly (though not entirely) by the relation between the three big blocks of sound which the orchestra has been playing. The three 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 of the stature of D.H. Lawrence as Joyce, but he is a fine and enduring artist and the only living British novelist who can be discussed without fatuity against the highest and the broadest standard. (xv) K.W. Grandson examines the spiritual and moral aspects of the highly complex novel as A Passage to India is, with its intriable structure and unusual pattern, more attained to music then just an ordinary piece of fiction A Passage to India seems to say the last word (not technically as Joyce seemed to) but spiritually, emotionally, morally : it drained a whole tradition to the dregs, and we are left with the choice between contemplating an empty cup or refilling it again from the past. The novel poses infinite speculations. How far is Forster offeringand not just within the Indian framework of the storythe sacred contagion of Hinduism as a spiritual corrective to the limitations of individualism, an all inclusive salvation for a world doomed to fragmentation by its own ignorance and selfishness ? How far is the final message a despairing judgement on the thrust and assertiveness of western man since the Renaissance ? The terrifying insights of the caves, the joyous ones of the temple, seem to be put forward as not morally between but as more sensible than the constantly failing simplifications, the crude techniques of the will to power. (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 his novels. Roughly stated, the division is between, on the one side, an inherited liberalism confirmed among life-long friends at Cambridge and never altogether discarded which stresses the authority of the individual conscience, and stressed also the qualities of sensitiveness and lucidity in personal relations within the setting of a civilized private life. On the other side, Mr. Forster has always represented the natural order surrounding this little compound of cultivated ground as sublime, unknown, unlimited, and as not adopted to our powers of understanding. We cannot be safe and at home within the compound, however much we may defensively pretend to be. The function of art is to take men outside the compound of conscious awareness, beyond their moral anxieties, and to find expression for the deeper rhythms 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 instance when the learned critic Lord Davi Cecil says, If that vision is incoherent, if those foundations are insecure, so also is the building that rests on them. We move through it entranced that uneasy; for we are, half unconsciously aware that at any moment the whole delicate structure may come tumbling about our ears. (xviii) We must not ignore Forsters own comments in the novel irrigated by his poetic vision 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 places In 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 not have 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 to turn away from both and seek a compromise half-way between them. One is reminded again of the vehement assertion in Howards End : No, truth, being alive, was not half-way between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion 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 image linked with the reading arches of the sky and with Mrs. Moores glimpses of in monotonous meaningless bou-oum the echo brings to the surface uglier levels of experience already associated 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 so meaningful arises from his handling of a complex design which is at once dramatic, symbolic and 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 immediate dramatic moment. While presenting a seemingly personal crisis Forster has expressed the vision perhaps most characteristic of the twentieth century, the discovery that the universe may not be a unity but chaos, that older philosophic and religious orders with the values they guaranteed have dissolved. The vision of A Passage to India has its counterparts in The Education of Henry Adams and in Gerontion and The Waste Land. All these visions arewith differing 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 in the 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 Trilling Forsters 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 suppose that the Indian Civil Service has its quota of decent, devoted and humble officials. But if Forsters portraits are perhaps angry exaggerations, anger can be illuminatingthe English of Forsters Chandrapore are the limits towards which the English in India must approach, for Lord 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 these emotions 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 of civilization .... complete, dignified, rather hard and for the first time Fielding treats him with diffidence but this only serves to show us how lacking in dignity Aziz usually is. Very possibly this is the effect that Indians make upon even sensitive Westerners: Dickinson, as we have seen, was bored by them, and generations of subjection can diminish the habits of dignity and teach grown men the strategy of little child. (j) Even if we feel any indictment of Forster by Trilling for not representing the English and the Indians truly, we have to be sure that Forster could be ironic, in this sense, at least by exaggerating and by resorting to the Dickinson art of caricature to a certain degree, though Dickens lay stress more on characters as individuals than on individuals as members of a race 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 official English as so unremittingly bad and the Indians as so unremittingly feeble is to prevent the story from being sufficiently worked out in terms of the characters : the characters, that is, are in the events, the events are not in them : We want a large Englishman that Fielding, a weightier Indian than Aziz. (k) To be sure, even though Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair is a much more lively and living character than any of Forsters probably in any of his novels, yet even Thackeray had to exaggerate to some extent to drive home his point. (l) There is explicitly satirical irony in the meeting between Fielding and Adela, as Forster says about it A friendliness as of dwarfs shaking hands was in the air. Both man and woman were at the 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 were dissatisfied. When they agreed, I want to go on living a bit, or, I dont believe in God, the words were followed by a curious backwash as though the universe had displaced itself to fill up a tiny void, or though they had seen their own gestures from an immense heightdwarfs talking, 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 an artist 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 at this moment of development, for the characters of a novel, as he has said elsewhere, Suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race ; they give us the illusion of perspicacity and power. A Passage to India, though it tells us more about its characters than they themselves know, tries to refute the very thought that our race is comprehensible and manageable; it casts doubt upon the claim of anyone, even of the artist, to supply the full context of human action. In writing one novel which pays full deference to the unknown and the unknowable. 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 has been minimised. Thereafter, the novel takes entirely different shapes, as it becomes highly psychological, 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 ; and the sun spreads not love but lust and muddle. Or, instead of Krishna, a British magistrate arrives : He comes, he comes, he comes, says a satirical Indian. The lack of this coming is felt by the guests at the party who hear Godboles song; they are unwell, with some malaise of privation ; they are suffering from a deficiency of meaning, which cannot be cured until love takes upon itself the form of Krishna and saves the world in the rain. The unity he makes in an image of art ; for a moment at least all in one, apprehensible by love; nothing is excepted or extraordinary. The novel itself assumes a similar unity, becomes a mystery, revelation of wholeness; and does so without disturbing the story or the parable .... ....We cannot know too much about the remarkable inclusiveness of the book. We continue to have our illusions of order and clever faking ; but this book reminds us how vast the effort for totality must be : nothing is excepted, the extraordinary is essential to order. The cities of muddle, the echoes of disorder, the excepting and the excepted, are all to made meaningful 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 Burra says This, then, is what gives to the raw material of his stories such distinctionthe quality which he comprehensively calls Rhythm, which means the use of left-motif phrases and images to link up separated parts, with the additional function of dramatic irony and symbolism. This it is which gives pattern to the most diffuse of all forms. The deviceof motifs, irony, and symbolsis, in fact, the modern equivalent of the classical unities, an invention of the greatest value, 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 says that 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 yet transcend 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 not coextensive as they are in all Forsters other novels. The plot is precise, hard, crystallized and far simpler than any Forster has previously conceived. The story is beneath and above the plot and continues beyond it in time. It is, to be sure, created by the plot, it is the plots manifold reverberation, but it is greater than the plot and contains it. The plot is as decisive as a a judicial opinion, the story is an impulse, a tendency, a perception. The suspension of not in the 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 plot and 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 the point of the story. Forster himself says in Aspects of the NovelWe need a vantage post, for the novel is a formidable 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 by hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. It will be worthwhile to study at some length Forsters reaction to Aristotelian concept of the plot as envisaged in his Aspects of the Novel Character, says Aristotle, gives us qualities, but it is in actionswhat we dothat we are happy or the reverse. have already decided that Aristotle is wrong and now we must face the 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 the secret life, which each of us leads privately and to which (in his characters) the novelist has access. And by the secret life we mean the life for which there is no external evidence, not, as in vulgarly supposed, that which is revealed by a chance, word or a sign. A chance, word or sign are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder : the life they reveal ceases to be secret and enters the realm of action. There is, however, no occasion to be hard on Aristotle. He had read few novels and no modern 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 be extracted; and when he wrote the words quoted above he had in view the drama, where no doubt they hold true. In the drama all human happiness and misery does and must take the form of action. Otherwise its existence remains unknown, and this in the great difference between drama and the novel. Q. 5. How does Realism find expression in British fiction of the 1960s? Base your answer on your understanding of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Ans. Politics was replaced by a greater concentration on some religious and moral issues after the first great war. Miss Spark has touched upon both an in Miss Sandy and Miss Boddie diverse threads of Christanity in her novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The attitude of students is releated to Roman Catholicism, where as tideolgy of her student is related to calvinism. In order to understand the divergent views, we shall first concetnrate on the doctrines expounded by Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Knox know to differentiate their views from the doctrines of the Roman Cathlic Church, The Christian Church at Rome was founded by the chief apostle of Christ. St. Peter. The Bishop of Rome have then onwardhave claimed for their office a direct succession from St. Peter. The Pope of Rome is the religious head 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 the teaching of the Pope. When the Pope speaks is his apostolic capacity he always makes a pronouncement in matters of faith and morals. The birth of protestanitism akrs the breakway from the Roman Catholic Church. In Europe, 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 indulgences were certificates of pardon sold for money by the Pope to pardon the worng actions of buyers. Martin Luther drew attention of educated people of the society by nailing a protest to the Church in Witemburg. The Church in Rome condemened him as heretic and excommunicated. Martin Luther was intelligent enough to realise that the could not rreform the existing Catholic Church. In 1530, he formulated the basic of a new Church. In 1530, he formulated the basis of a new doctrine that broke away from Roman Catholicism. the reformation movement reached England in 1934 when King Henry VIII served relations with the Pope of Rome and declared himself head of the Church of England. It got a firm base during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Martin Luther influenced, John Calvin, a Swiss religious reformer, greatly. His teaching was the code of simplicity and austerity. He urged the masses to follow these codes in day to day life and Chruch ritual, Calvinism is against the free wil of individuals and look through everything 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 Scotland and replaced by Calvinistic confession of faith. This faith was drawn by Knox with the help of the colleagues. The religious learnings of Miss Brodie are clearly Calvinistic. She disaproves the Church of Rome and terms it to be the "Church of Supersition", and firmly belives that "only people who did not thing for themselves were Roman Catholies. She distances hderself from the Roman Catholic Church and becomes. "the God of Calvin-Who sees the beginnings and the end" She believes that God is omipotent and sets about ordering her own life and also that of others. Her total lack of guilt in assuming this bluers her moral perceptions. "She was not" writes Spark, in any doubut, she let everyone knows she was in no doubt, that God was on her, side whatever her course and she experienced no difficulty or sense of hypocrisy in workship and at the same time, she went to bed with sining master. The sense of isolation and alientation that she encountered at the end of her life was brought an by a weakned sense of morality. The attitudes of Miss Brodie towards education are also releated to Calvinism. Like Calvins God, she holds way over the Brodie Set and expects from each of them to fulfill her expectations at each step of their lives. For this, she adopts a psychological approach. Wh protrays herself to her students as a victim of the system that come in between her high ideals. Miss Brodie seeks to assure her students of an academic salvation by promosing to turn them into the creme de la creme among their friends provided they follow her advice in words and letters. She got confidence of six girls and started about planning and organising their futures for them she sees potential of fulfilling her dream in Rose and Sandy. Miss Brodie Sparks write in her novel. The Prime of Miss Brodie that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with her instinct to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyeds lover, and Sandy with her insight to act as informant on the affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy hand been chosen as the creme 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 suggests that the Catholic Church was a suitable channel for normalising her. Had Miss Brodie lived within the limits of doctrine and community, whe might have been saved from the pitfalls of personal judgement. Whe could have made use of her energy in better directions of life than wasting her faculties to set explosive ideas in the minds of her followers. When Sandy sees throug the effect of Miss Brodies imposition of her ideology and enthusiasm, she understands the evel designs of her mentor. She feels perturbed by the images on Lloyds canvases where all the girls appear to resemble Miss Brodie. She is alarmed to hear of the circumstances of Emily Joyees death. Sandy senses that Miss Brodie has elected herself to grace and saw her as a symbol of power that ruled over the lives of smaller people Miss Brodies, self-righteousness and absense of humility makes Sandy uncomformtable wh sees an excessive lack of guilt in her teacher. Later on Sany read John Calvin, and found it difficult to see eye to eye to his dcotrine in which the human soluld was ensalved to sin and give people and enoromous sense of joy and salvation so that their surprise at the end might be nastier Calvinisms deterministic approach is not accepted by Sandy in favour of the more redemptive Roman Catholicism. She present the picture of Miss Brodie as a Calvinistic presence designing and determining the future of innocent minds and decides to stop it. She is 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 selfrighteousness, she is able to understand that Miss Brodies sense of self righteousness and enlarging aspects had not been without its beneficient. Muriel Spark does to accept the determinism of Calvin and Knock. Spark values seenign the truth with sentiments. InThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie humbug and falsehood became targets of her denunciation.

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