‘Aspects of the Novel’ is based on a series of weekly lectures which E. M. Forster gave at Trinity College Cambridge in 1927, in which he discussed the English novel. Forster used examples from classic novels to describe what he claimed to be the seven universal aspects of the novel, namely:
- story
- characters
- plot
- fantasy
- prophecy
- pattern
- rhythm
The book was mocked when I was a student for its rambling, amateurish, belle-lettreist approach, lacking all reference to any kind of smart theory. Forster knew it lacked intellectual depth and modestly described it as ‘a ramshackly survey’, but he deprecates to deceive. Although eschewing scholarship and expertise, he says many interesting things, and it’s fascinating to read the comments on eminent books and authors by one of themselves.
Introduction
Forster doesn’t make grand statements or general rules, in fact he’s all about how difficult it is to define or discuss the novel. What, even, is a novel?
He adapts the suggestion of Monsieur Abel Chevalley that it is ‘a fiction in prose of a certain length’, adding it probably needs to be over 50,000 words long. He doesn’t say this, but the issue reminds me of all those Joseph Conrad stories which are too long to be short stories but don’t quite make Forster’s word count. ‘Heart of Darkness’ is 37,906 words long. Is it a novel or a novella? D.H. Lawrence wrote half a dozen works more complex than short stories, but without the full weight and length of novels, so they are called novellas.
Forster wants to talk about the ‘English’ novel, so what does ‘English’ mean in this context? Does it refer to the country? No. To any long fiction work written in English.
It’s notable that Forster doesn’t worry about the implications of American fiction swamping British fiction. In 1927 maybe it was still seen as the poor relation. He’s much more concerned with the influence on the English novel of the Continent. But this, he says, is in fact negligible. English fictions writers are sometimes influenced by the French, but rarely by the Spanish, Italian, Germans or any other national literature. In this, as everything else, the English are insular and generally hold aloof from the Continent.
But he makes a few chastening points about English fiction in a nominal league table of achievement:
No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy—that is to say has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.
English poetry is world class. English fiction less so. He cites Bronte, Hardy, Gaskell, Meredith and says they’re fine in their way, often give vivid portraits of particularly English areas and types. But set next to War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov? No.
He is extremely averse to the notion of ‘periods’ (the Victorian novel, ‘Edwardian fiction’ etc) much beloved by academics. Ditto the idea of ‘influence’, that this or that writer is writing under, or seeking to evade, the influence of this or that other writer.
Forster prefers to think of all the writers he deals with sitting in the British Library Reading Room with pens in hand, at the same time, dealing with the same kinds of problems, unaffected by their times or predecessors, an attitude he summarises as:
History develops, Art stands still.
A note on scholarship. Genuine scholarship, defined as having read everything in your subject and something from around the fringes and having taste and discrimination, is extremely rare. Most people are pseudo-scholars who know about particular authors or periods. This is why pseudo-scholarship likes specialising in particular periods, or authors, or subjects, and compiles a mocking list.
The literature of Inns, beginning with Tom Jones; the literature of the Women’s Movement, beginning with Shirley; the literature of Desert Islands, from Robinson Crusoe to The Blue Lagoon; the literature of Rogues—dreariest of all, though the Open Road runs it pretty close…
Obviously all these objections have been swept away by a century of pseudo-scholarship. His approach is going to be to quote from various classic novelists and make comments.
He gives passages from Samuel Richardson and Henry James before making the point that both are anxious rather than ardent psychologists. Each is sensitive to suffering and appreciates self-sacrifice but falls short of the tragic, though a close approach is made.
Then H.G. Wells (Mr Polly) and Dickens (Great Expectations). They are both humorists and visualizers who get an effect by cataloguing details. They are generous-minded and hate shams. They are valuable social reformers. Sometimes the lively surface of their prose scratches like a cheap gramophone record, a certain poorness of quality appears. Neither of them has much taste: the world of beauty was largely closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells.
Then Tristram Shandy and Virginia Woolf. They are both fantasists. They start with a little object, take a flutter from it, and settle on it again. They combine a humorous appreciation of the muddle of life with a keen sense of its beauty. There is a rather deliberate bewilderment, an announcement to all and sundry that they do not know where they are going. But their tones are very different. Sterne is a sentimentalist, Virginia Woolf is extremely aloof. Virginia Woolf’s her aim and general effect both resemble Sterne’s (discuss).
Technique changes and develops. Sterne and Woolf may have certain things in common but Woolf’s way of expressing them is more developed and advanced.
Anti-theory (obviously). The Bloomsbury emphasis on friendship and affection as the ultimate moral criteria.
Principles and systems may suit other forms of art, but they cannot be applicable here… I am afraid it will be the human heart, it will be this man-to-man business, justly suspect in its cruder forms. The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
Sentimentality… will lurk in the background saying, ‘Oh, but I like that,’ ‘Oh, but that doesn’t appeal to me,’ and all I can promise is that sentimentality shall not speak too loudly or too soon. The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided. The novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism.
Story
The basis of a novel is a story, and a story is a narrative of events arranged in time sequence
He postulates three (rather wishy-washy silly) attitudes to story in the novel, and says his one is:
Yes — oh, dear, yes — the novel tells a story.
He is really against the need for a story in a novel. Some call it the backbone of the text, but he calls it the tapeworm. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist.
He calls it the ‘low atavistic form’ and paints a picture of the crudest Neanderthal people sitting round a fire at the end of a day hunting mammoth and being enthralled by the group’s resident storyteller, the urge to tell goes back that far and the urge to hang on each development of the plot.
The classic example is the Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherazade tells a story each night but ends abruptly when the sun rises, this keeping her wicked husband in perpetual suspense to hear what happens next.
We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next. That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story. Some of us want to know nothing else—there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity, and consequently our other literary judgments are ludicrous. And now the story can be defined. It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence — dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on. Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story. It is the lowest and simplest of literary organisms. Yet it is the highest factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels.
He then posits two ways of thinking about time. One is pure chronology, one event after another, what he calls the time-sense. But there is also ‘life by values’ where we live for, and remember, only certain special intense moments. The cheapest novels (typically, detective novels and thrillers) exist simply to tell what happens next. More sophisticated examples dwell on values i.e. on the special moments, for example turning points, in characters’ lives. Thus the novel has a double allegiance, to life by time and life by values.
But no matter how much you prefer the values approach, you can never relinquish plot. The novelist must cling, however lightly, to the thread of their story, they must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise they become unintelligible.
One novelist has tried to abandon all signs of plot, Gertrude Stein who ‘hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time and to express in it the life by values only.’
She fails because as soon as fiction is completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at all… [it was a noble experiment but doomed to failure because] the time-sequence cannot be destroyed without carrying in its ruin all that should have taken its place; the novel that would express values only becomes unintelligible and therefore valueless.
Back to the basic need for a story, Walter Scott is a prime example of a storyteller which is why Forster doesn’t like him. Scott has ‘a trivial mind and a heavy style.’ He cannot construct. He has neither artistic detachment nor passion. He only has a temperate heart and gentlemanly feelings, and an intelligent affection for the country-side and this is not basis enough for great novels.
Forster gives a long summary of the plot of Scott’s (1816), the third of the Waverley novels to show how one damn thing happens after another, Scott deploying characters’ comings and goings purely to extend the plot, till he runs out of steam and ties everything up with the wedding of the nice young people. It is a classic example of a novelist focusing on ‘the life in time’, which leads to ‘slackening of emotion and shallowness of judgment, and in particular to that idiotic use of marriage as a finale’.
He compares this with Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale which is a book dominated by time: ‘Time is the real hero of The Old Wives’ Tale’, showing the growth and ageing and death of the lead female characters. This has more integrity and depth than Scott plonking down event after event but, in the end, isn’t enough. The Old Wives Tale is ‘strong, sincere and sad but misses greatness.’
He contrasts both these with Tolstoy’s War and Peace which also shows characters growing old but makes the interesting point that the hero of Tolstoy’s novel is not time but space, the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them.
Many novelists have the feeling for place — Five Towns (Bennett), Auld Reekie (Scott), and so on. Very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy’s divine equipment. Space is the lord of ‘War and Peace’, not time.
A note about ‘voice’. Forster reverts to his description of:
the voice of the tribal narrator, squatting in the middle of the cave, and saying one thing after another until the audience falls asleep among their offal and bones. The story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us.
People
Characters are ‘word masses’ arranged and grouped by the writer, given characteristic gestures or phrases, and assigned names and slowly accumulating into characters.
What is the difference between people in life and people in books? History gives us the outward actions of people. Only the novelist can take us inside minds to show their motivation.
In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life.
He suggests there are five basic facts of human existence: birth, food, sleep, love and death (you could add others, but these seem central), then gives a brief description of each.
About birth we know nothing and Forster is surprised how few novelists really describe it or the mental state of the baby or infant. Tristram Shandy and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man stand out as two exceptions.
Death on the other hand, is extremely popular with novelists, for two practical reasons. 1) The death of a character in the middle of the story can be used to trigger emotion; 2) death of the main character is a handy and time-honoured way to end the story. He doesn’t mention them, but think of the tragedies of the ancient world.
Food is strangely ignored in fiction; often characters just eat something, sometimes provender is ignored for pages and days.
Sleep is also usually neglected in fiction. We all sleep for about a third of our lives, yet fiction ignores this unless it needs to mention disturbed sleep or specific dreams.
Love:
You all know how enormously love bulks in novels, and will probably agree with me that it has done them harm and made them monotonous. Why has this particular experience, especially in its sex form, been transplanted in such generous quantities?
( Forster has no answer but I have: Darwin. Of course we obsess about love (and sex) because it is one of our deepest biological imperatives, to mate and breed, and even after breeding the imperative (in men at any rate) to mate and ejaculate continues as an urgent force until the end of our lives. Women on the other hand, bearers of babies for nine long months and then their carers for decades afterwards, naturally want to marry well, and so spend an inordinate amount of time picking and choosing who to marry / mate with. It is the theme of all Jane Austen’s novels.)
Back to Forster, he sees two reasons why love is so monotonously prominent in fictions:
1) As part of the general over-sensitiveness of all fictional characters:
The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other — even in writers called robust like Fielding — is remarkable, and has no parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure. Passion, intensity at moments — yes, but not this constant awareness, this endless readjusting, this ceaseless hunger. I believe that these are the reflections of the novelist’s own state of mind while he composes, and that the predominance of love in novels is partly because of this.
2) We wish love to be perfect. This is one reason so many narratives end in marriage, while the future is imagined to be a perfect harmony which the reality of being married, obviously, undermines. Ending narratives with marriage is ending with hope and promise.
He introduces the entertaining concept of Homo fictus. He
is generally born off, he is capable of dying on, he wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with human relationships. And — most important — we can know more about him than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator and narrator are one.
He ends with an extended meditation on the character of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, admiring her good sense, high spirits, kindness and humour. He thinks Moll Flanders is an:
example of a novel, in which a character is everything and is given freest play. Defoe makes a slight attempt at a plot with the brother-husband as a centre, but he is quite perfunctory, and her legal husband (the one who took her on the jaunt to Oxford) just disappears and is heard of no more. Nothing matters but the heroine; she stands in an open space like a tree, and having said that she seems absolutely real from every point of view.
He asks when do we feel that a character in a book is ‘real’?
It is real when the novelist knows everything about it. He may not choose to tell us all he knows — many of the facts, even of the kind we call obvious, may be hidden. But he will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.
I was really comforted by Forster’s explanation. I worry all the time that I don’t really ‘get’ people, the people at work and people in social situations (at the school pickup, at parties). I worry all the time that I don’t understand people and so am saying the wrong thing. It is precisely because novels give us the illusion that we can and do understand people, that we find them so comforting. This is Forster’s view.
Human intercourse… is… haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly and… can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. [Fictional characters] are… people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible. And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.
They give us the comforting illusion that life is more ‘manageable’ than, in reality, it actually is. Or indeed, more explicable.
People (part 2): types of character and points of view
But Moll is an exception. She is a solitary. Most characters in most novels exist in relationship to a number of characters. Taking them out of context is like taking half the bushes out of a mature and well planned shrubbery: everything looks sparse and bare as a result. Their canny arrangement is the key.
But characters can be anarchic. Given too much vigour they can destroy the plan and lopside the plot.
1. Two types of character, flat and round
Flat characters used to be called humours or caricatures, can be summarised in a line.
Flat characters are very useful to him, since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere — little luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars… He is the idea, and such life as he possesses radiates from its edges and from the scintillations it strikes when other elements in the novel impinge.
They are often more memorable than main characters precisely because they don’t change and so comforting or reassuring.
All of us, even the sophisticated, yearn for permanence, and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of art. We all want books to endure, to be refuges, and their inhabitants to be always the same, and flat characters tend to justify themselves on this account.
The special case of Dickens, almost all of whose characters are ‘flat’, yet his incredible vitality gives his books an amazing depth. Similarly most of H.G. Wells’s characters are flat but come to life because of the author’s tremendous brio. Dickens and Wells are good at transmitting force which animates everything, even when they’re only puppets.
Why are Jane Austen’s characters round?
She is a miniaturist, but never two-dimensional. All her characters are round, or capable of rotundity… her characters though smaller than his are more highly organized. They function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them than it does, they would still be adequate… All the Jane Austen characters are ready for an extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so satisfactorily.
The test:
The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat.
2. Point of view
He cites Percy Lubbock who said point of view is the central weapon in the novelist’s armoury and defined three types:
- from outside characters, as an onlooker
- omniscience i.e. can describe everything from within
- take the part of one of the characters and be in the dark about the motives of all the others
Forster thinks this privileging of point of view is a symptom of ‘critics’ wanting to make The Novel a special case with its own rules and techniques. Personally, he thinks it less important than a proper mix of characters and the writer’s ability to ‘bounce’ us into believing them.
Gide’s ‘Les Faux Monnayeurs’ plays with different points of view and tactics but is too clever to be involving.
The Plot
Aristotle thought character was revealed through action, but then he was talking about drama, the stage. Forster thinks action (the plot) is less important for the novel.
A story is a series of events. A plot is a series of events with some element of causality and explanation involved. Curiosity is enough to understand a story (‘when happened next?’). Understanding a plot requires memory (for facts scattered earlier) and intelligence (to piece together and interpret them).
George Meredith is now unfashionable but was once, around 1900, all the rage. Forster thinks he is one of the great contrivers of plots. His contrivances are plausible and they alter characters.
A writer who is far greater than Meredith, and yet less successful as a novelist — Thomas Hardy. Hardy seems to me essentially a poet, who conceives of his novels from an enormous height. They are to be tragedies or tragi-comedies, they are to give out the sound of hammer-strokes as they proceed; in other words Hardy arranges events with emphasis on causality, the ground plan is a plot, and the characters are ordered to acquiesce in its requirements. Except in the person of Tess (who conveys the feeling that she is greater than destiny) this aspect of his work is unsatisfactory. His characters are involved in various snares, they are finally bound hand and foot, there is ceaseless emphasis on fate, and yet, for all the sacrifices made to it, we never see the action as a living thing as we see it in Antigone or Berenice or The Cherry Orchard.
Most novels are feeble at the end because the plot takes over. The novelist needs to end the thing and so character and other aspects are all put on hold while the bits and pieces of the plot are tied up. Which is why novel ending are so often flat and disappointing.
Forster devotes five pages to describing Gide’s attempts to deconstruct novel writing in ‘Les Faux Monnayeurs’ which, I must say, sound contrived and clunky.
Fantasy
There is more in the novel than time or people or logic or any of their derivatives, more even than Fate. And by ‘more’ I do not mean something that excludes these aspects nor something that includes them, embraces them. I mean something that cuts across them like a bar of light, that is intimately connected with them at one place and patiently illumines all their problems, and at another place shoots over or through them as if they did not exist. We shall give that bar of light two names, fantasy and prophecy.
His sections on fantasy and prophecy are suddenly incoherent, under-developed. He gives no very useful definition of fantasy. He sounds very like Forster in introducing the notion of fauns and dryads and Pan: this sounds like his strange short stories. He also sounds like Forster in claiming the great god Muddle stands behind Tristram Shandy. This is the first place where I felt his opinion was inadequate and embarrassing.
He gives a long rather embarrassing summary of a now unknown book called ‘Flecker’s Magic’, by Norman Matson, in which a boy is given a wishing ring by a witch etc. He goes on to summarise and quote Max Beebohm’s fantastical comic novel ‘Zuleika Dobson’, ‘a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical’. His quotes make it sound tiresome. Much has happened to the genre of Fantasy over the past 100 years to make his comments seem vain.
Parody. Very useful for the type of writer who has a lot to say but doesn’t take to creating characters: they can simply parody someone else’s. After mentioning Lowes Dickinson’s book ‘The Magic Flute’ he wastes a couple of pages giving a surprisingly unsympathetic summary of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. I was disappointed to see Forster takes the Bloomsbury / Virginia Woolf line that Ulysses is a book about dirt and smut:
It is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, it is an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell (!).. an epic of grubbiness and disillusion.
He thinks the aim of the book is ‘to degrade all things and more particularly civilization and art, by turning them inside out and upside down’. On this page I stopped respecting Forster’s opinion and realised how trapped he is in his timid, bourgeois English tea-party provincialism.
Prophecy
When the author wants to say something about the universe, a visionary, bardic strain. It is predominantly a tone of voice. To fully appreciate it you have to suspend your sense of humour, your sense of the absurd. He mentions D.H. Lawrence in this regard.
He quotes a long passage from ‘Adam Bede’ by George Eliot and makes the sage point that her writing depends on her ‘massiveness,’ because ‘she has no nicety of style’. Then a passage from ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ to show what it means to say that Dostoyevsky was a prophet. It means that everything means more than it says, reaches out to have cosmic implications.
We are not concerned with the prophet’s message, or rather (since matter and manner cannot be wholly separated) we are concerned with it as little as possible. What matters is the accent of his voice, his song.
Fantasy is diffuse, sparkles with fragments, whereas prophecy is focused on a great central vision. Fantasy is more often than not funny whereas prophecy requires suspension of humour.
Forster gives an extended summary of Herbert Melville’s classic novel ‘Moby Dick’, dwelling on its visionary prophetic character. It is more song than novel. And he adds a summary of the short story ‘Billy Budd’. Both of them are allegories of good and evil (though he doesn’t use the word allegory).
He makes the striking point that Melville wasn’t hampered by a conscience ‘that tiresome little receptacle… which is often such a nuisance in serious writers and so contracts their effects.’
Then D.H. Lawrence, ‘the only prophetic novelist writing today’. He makes the shrewd point that Lawrence was also a preacher and lots of people are irritated or angered by the preaching. But the real writer lies ‘far, far back’ behind the surface antagonisms and speaks with the voice of the Norse god Balder.
The prophet is irradiating nature from within, so that every colour has a glow and every form a distinctness which could not otherwise be obtained. Take a scene that always stays in the memory: that scene in ‘Women in Love’ where one of the characters throws stones into the water at night to shatter the image of the moon. Why he throws, what the scene symbolizes, is unimportant. But the writer could not get such a moon and water otherwise; he reaches them by his special path which stamps them as more wonderful than any we can imagine. It is the prophet back where he started from, back where the rest of us are waiting by the edge of the pool, but with a power of re-creation and evocation we shall never possess.
He rightly realises that Lawrence writes as if from an entirely new world.
He ends with ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë. It is a book of storms, visions and prophetic tone of voice. The notorious thing about ‘Wuthering Heights’ is that no one can remember the plot, they just remember the giant passion of the central characters.
Pattern and Rhythm
He discusses some books with patterns: the hour glass of ‘Thais’ Anatole France in which two characters swap plights; the daisy chain in ‘Roman Pictures’ by Percy Lubbock in which one character is passed along through a sequence of encounters with others.
Pattern and Henry James
Far more complicated is ‘The Ambassadors’ by Henry James. He summarises the plot and has a few words of praise for James:
He is so good at indicating instantaneously and constantly that a character is second rate, deficient in sensitiveness, abounding in the wrong sort of worldliness; he gives such a character so much vitality that its absurdity is delightful.
Like a lot of people I am put off reading James by the reputation for hyper-sensibility which surrounds him and then, on the few occasions I’ve tried, have struggled to penetrate through the prose and understand what is going on. So it is a relief to read Forster’s criticisms of The Master.
The basic one is that 1) James wrote works of art but at the cost of leaving most of human life out of them. And then 2) Forster says he has a very restricted number of character types who recur in all his novels, namely:
- the observer who tries to influence the action
- the second-rate outsider
- the sympathetic foil, very lively and frequently female
- the wonderful rare heroine
- sometimes a villain
- sometimes a young artist with generous impulses
Forster’s summary is comic: ‘And that is about all. For so fine a novelist it is a poor show.’ And then 3):
The characters, beside being few in number, are constructed on very stingy lines. They are incapable of fun, of rapid motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their income, their servants are noiseless or resemble themselves, no social explanation of the world we know is possible for them, for there are no stupid people in their world, no barriers of language, and no poor. Even their sensations are limited. They can land in Europe and look at works of art and at each other, but that is all. Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James’s pages — maimed yet specialized.
As interesting as Forster’s points is the vivid way he expresses them:
The longer James worked, the more convinced he grew that a novel should be a whole—not necessarily geometric like The Ambassadors, but it should accrete round a single topic, situation, gesture, which should occupy the characters and provide a plot, and should also fasten up the novel on the outside—catch its scattered statements in a net, make them cohere like a planet, and swing through the skies of memory.
And:
Put Tom Jones or Emma or even Mr. Casaubon into a Henry James book, and the book will burn to ashes.
Conclusion:
Though they [Henry James characters] are not dead — certain selected recesses of experience he explores very well — they are gutted of the common stuff that fills characters in other books, and ourselves. And this castrating is not in the interests of the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no philosophy in the novels, no religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no prophecy, no benefit for the superhuman at all. It is for the sake of a particular æsthetic effect which is certainly gained, but at this heavy price.
H.G. Wells wrote a very funny satire of James which he cheerfully sent to The Master and was surprised when James was profoundly upset. Wells thinks the novel should overflow with people and ideas and life. Interestingly, Forster concludes:
My own prejudices are with Wells. The James novels are a unique possession and the reader who cannot accept his premises misses some valuable and exquisite sensations. But I do not want more of his novels.
So James demonstrates the limitations of seeking Pattern, which is to say, seeking formal Beauty, in a novel. The chances are: the more Beauty, the less life and humanity.
To put it in other words, the novel is not capable of as much artistic development as the drama: its humanity or the grossness of its material hinder it (use whichever phrase you like). To most readers of fiction the sensation from a pattern is not intense enough to justify the sacrifices that made it.
Rhythms large and small
Two types of rhythm, large and small, macro and micro.
Micro rhythms Proust has examples of micro rhythms but not macro. Forster makes the bold claim that ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ ‘is chaotic, ill constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.’
By rhythms what he appears to mean are recurring facts, connections and coincidences. He gives the specific example of a phrase from a piece of music which recurs only at long intervals of hundreds of pages:
Rhythm can develop, and the little phrase has a life of its own, unconnected with the lives of its auditors, as with the life of the man who composed it. It is almost an actor, but not quite, and that ‘not quite’ means that its power has gone towards stitching Proust’s book together from the inside, and towards the establishment of beauty and the ravishing of the reader’s memory. There are times when the little phrase — from its gloomy inception, through the sonata into the sextet — means everything to the reader. There are times when it means nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.
Macro rhythms Very large scale repetitions and shape as in a classical symphony (in this case, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony). In fact, very candidly, Forster tells us he can’t think of an example of this macro rhythm in fiction.
Maybe in drama because drama is more tightly structured, in drama characters submit to the dramatic shape which is known from the start. But fiction, as he sweetly puts it, ‘Human beings have their great chance in the novel.’
Early on, in the chapter about plots, Forster lamented that novels have to end, pointing out how lifeless the endings of most novels are, as the logic of closing the plot overrides the human vitality which has preceded it. Now, at the end of the book, he returns to the same idea. He says that at the end of a performance of a Beethoven symphony you hear chords or sense shapes which were never actually expressed in the music, which tower behind it. Then optimistically wishes the same kind of aesthetic effect could be achieved in a more open-ended type of fiction.
Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out.
When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is not there something of it in ‘War and Peace’? the book with which we began and in which we must end. Such an untidy book. Yet, as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we have finished does not every item even the catalogue of strategies – lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?
Conclusion
It’s fashionable to make predictions about The Future of the Novel but he won’t. All sorts of scientific discoveries and social transformations may occur but the task of the novelist will stay broadly the same. He repeats his motto: ‘History develops, art stands still.’ He imagines human nature will remain pretty fixed but gives himself a slight glimmer of hope.
If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect…
Maybe he meant his friends in the Bloomsbury Group, overinflating, as they all did, their own importance. Anyway, the state and the family have hardly been abolished because it seems like we need both of them. Organised religion, on the other hand, the personal repression, legal persecution and censorship exercised in the name of the Church of England, have largely withered away, like the Church itself. But, it turns out, via social media, the philistine press and other, rising religious organisations, we have invented new ways to judge and censor ourselves. That will never change.
As to The Future of the Novel, despite a century of pessimistic prognostications, this year, 2024, more novels than ever before were published. The Novel is doing fine.
Thoughts
1. Style
Only towards the end of the book did I notice the absence of Style from his handful of aspects. Style, the order of words in the sentence, the way sentences are assembled into paragraphs, is probably the aspect of novels which interests me most. It feels like Forster consciously avoided it, knowing what a minefield it is.
2. Forster’s oddly strange or incisive phrasing
Forster almost goes out of his way to appear a gentlemanly old buffer, an amiable old cove, and yet his writing often contains disconcerting turns of phrase and thought, which seem unexpectedly modern, harsh or violent.
In his fiction this is most obvious in the short stories, which are surprisingly weird, but these oddities crop up continually in everything he writes. For example, his opening comparison of ‘the story’ to a tapeworm. Here are some other oddities:
We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to tell us what birth and death are like: a mother, for instance, has her point of view about birth, a doctor, a religious, have their points of view about both. But it is all from the outside, and the two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so, because their apparatus for communicating their experiences is not attuned to our apparatus for reception.
Then food, the stoking up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.
When a baby arrives in a novel it usually has the air of having been posted.
[Characters] are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.
One of our foremost writers, Mr. Norman Douglas, is a critic of this type, and the passage from him which I will quote puts the case against flat characters in a forcible fashion. The passage occurs in an open letter to D. H. Lawrence, with whom he is quarrelling: a doughty pair of combatants, the hardness of whose hitting makes the rest of us feel like a lot of ladies up in a pavilion.
Credit
Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster was published 1927 by Edward Arnold. References are to the 1962 Pelican paperback edition.
Books & Boots 