E. M.

Forster – Aspects of the Novel

Aspects of the Novel is a collection of lectures on English novel by E. M. Forster, delivered at
Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1927.

 Introduction
M. Abel Chevalley defines a ‘novel’ to be:

“a fiction in prose of a certain extent”

Forster adds to it a word limit; over 50,000 words.

The novel will be ‘English’ in literary terms, not geographical. Great non-English writers like
Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust will be discussed.

The cultural background of novels will not be discussed, but their subject, their ideas and
their style.

The final test of a novel will be our affection for it.

Forster says that he chose the title Aspects because it is unscientific and vague, because it
leaves us the maximum of freedom, because it means both the different ways we can look
at a novel and the different ways a novelist can look at his work.

 The Story
Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.

According to Forster, a novel tells a story.

The story is what keeps the audience wanting to know and guessing ‘what happens next?’
That is the key element of a story – suspense.

According to Forster, a story is:

 “A narrative of events arranged in their time sequence – dinner coming after breakfast,
Tuesday after Monday.”

Our daily life is actually two lives – life in time and life in values. Life in time is the number of
minutes, hours, days spent. Value is independent of time, and that is what we are most
concerned in our lives.

A novel, on the other hand, narrates the life of time.

Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights tried to hide from time. Laurence Sterne in Tristram
Shandy turned everything upside down. But they fail to free themselves from time.

Forster chooses Sir Walter Scott as a story teller. He discusses The Antiquary.

The story of a completely different book, Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, is also
discussed. The time-depiction The Old Wives’ Tale is perhaps the most faithful to reality.
Sophia, Constance and their husbands come into this world and they all die by the end.

Realistically, a book can have no other ending than death. But it’s unsatisfactory. It lacks
greatness.

Like Arnold Bennett, Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace has shown the power of time on human
beings. Humans survive war but not age.

 People
This lecture is titled ‘people’ and not ‘characters’ because the actors in a story are usually
human.

What differs the characters in a novel from actual human beings is the fact that we do not
have access to the secret life of other human beings. We know each other approximately.
But people in a novel can be understood by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as
well as outer life can be exposed.

There are five facts around which human life revolves: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
Characters in a novel are not born. They arrive into the word like parcels.

Death receives a greater deal of attention from the novelist. It is because the novelist is aware
of his characters more than the characters themselves.

Food and sleep are usually unimportant in a novel.

Love is most emphasized in a novel. Forster believes there are two reasons for love being so
prominent in novels.

First, as the writer is undergoing the process of creation, love becomes important to him, and
he makes his characters unduly sensitive to it, unduly in the sense that they would not
trouble so much in life. Forster believes that these are the reflection of the novelist’s own
state of mind while he composes.

The second reason is our illusion attached to love is that it will be permanent. Also, like
death, it gives the novelist a suitable ending.

Forster concludes by comparing those two allied species, Homo Sapiens and Homo Fictus.
Homo Fictus 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 any of our fellow creatures.

Forster analyzes Moll Flanders from Defoe’s Moll Flanders.

 People (continued)
For creating characters, the novelist uses two devices. The first is the use of different kinds
of characters. The second is connected with the point of view.

Characters are divided into flat and round characters.

Flat characters are also called humors, types and caricatures. They are constructed round a
single idea or quality. The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence. For
example, ‘I need to get my daughters married’ is the best way to summarize Mrs. Bennet.
Flat characters are best when they are comic. They are unfit for a tragedy. It is only round
people who are fit to perform tragically for any length of time and can move us to any
feelings except humor and appropriateness.

Forster then discusses round characters. Lady Bertram from Mansfield Park is chosen for the
analysis of round characters. Vague and distracted throughout the novel, her reaction to the
elopement of her two daughters, Maria and Julia, is significant. She shows a reaction that is
opposite to her usual lazy, indifferent self.

The test of a round character is whether he is capable of surprising in a convincing way.

The second device of the novelist is point of view, or narration. The novelist either assumes
the role of the narrator, or tells the story from the perspective of one of his characters. First-
person and third-person narrations have their own advantages.

According to Forster, the power of the novelist is what makes the point of view good or bad
for the novel. Change in perspective is not itself bad, nor is it that important to the novel.

 The Plot
“Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions – what we do – that we are happy or the
reverse.” - Aristotle

Aristotle also states:

“All human happiness and misery take the form of action.”

These statements of Aristotle are false in a novel. But Aristotle cannot be blamed. He has
read few novels and no modern ones.

The novelist has access to self-communings, and from that level he can descend even deeper
and peer into the subconscious. This is why human happiness and misery in a novel does not
necessarily has to take the form of action.
A story has been defined as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot
can be defined as a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.

In a story we say: ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask: ‘Why?’

Curiosity does not take us far into the novel – only as far as the story. If we would grasp the
plot we must add intelligence and memory.

The intelligent novel reader, rather than just reading a new fact, mentally picks it up. He
does not understand it, but he does not expect to do so yet awhile. He sees it from two
points of view: isolated, and related to the other facts that he has read on previous pages.

The element of surprise or mystery… is of great importance in a plot… the true meaning of
which only dawns pages ahead.

Memory and intelligence are closely connected, for unless we remember we cannot
understand.

Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound up.
This is the inherent defect of novels; they go off at their end.

The plot, then, is the novel in its logical intellectual aspect; it requires mystery, but the
mystery is solved later on.

 Fantasy
Up to this point, Forster has ascertained that the novels all tell a story, contain characters,
and have plots or bits of plots.

The other novelists say, ‘Here is something that might occur in your lives,’ the fantasist:
‘Here is something that could never occur. I must ask you first to accept my book as a whole,
and secondly to accept certain things in my book’.

There are many readers to whom the fantastic element does not appeal. When the fantastic
is introduced it produces a special effect; some readers are thrilled, others choked off.
Forster differentiates between fantasy and prophecy.

There is in both the sense of mythology which differentiates them from other aspects.
Fantasy is concerned with all that is medieval this side of the grave. Prophecy, on the other
hand, contains all that is medieval beyond the grave.

The first example of fantasy Forster gives is Tristram Shandy. The supernatural is absent from
the Shandy ménage, yet a thousand incidents suggest that it is not far off. Obviously a god
is hidden in Tristram Shandy, his name is Muddle, and some readers cannot accept him.

After this example, Forster defines Fantasy thus:

It implies the supernatural, but need not express it. Often it does express it – such as the
introduction of a god, ghost, angel, monkey, monster, midget, witch into ordinary life; or
the introduction of ordinary men into no-man’s land, the future, the past, the interior of
the earth, the fourth dimension; or diving into and dividings of personality; or finally the
device of parody or adaptation.

Forster then gives two examples of fantasy; Flecker’s Magic by Norman Matson and Max
Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson.

Lastly, Forster discusses ‘parody’ and ‘adaptation’. Parody or adaptation have enormous
advantages to certain novelists, particularly to those who may have a great deal and
abundant literary genius. Parody most suits the authors who do not take easily to creating
characters... an already existing book or literary tradition may inspire them.

Forster discuss Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding in parody. Fielding wanted to mock Samuel
Richardson’s Pamela.

The other example given by Forster is Ulysses by James Joyce, based on Homer’s epic, the
Odyssey. The Odyssey follows Odysseus/Ulysses’ dangerous journey back home. Ulysses
follows a journey as well, the modern man’s journey from morn to midnight.
  Prophecy
Prophecy is an accent in the novelist’s voice. His theme is the universe, or something
universal, but he is not necessarily going to “say” something about the universe; he
proposes to sing.

The primary concern is the novelist’s state of mind and the actual words he uses, while
disregarding the problems of common sense.

As every aspect of the novel demands a different quality in the reader, the prophetic aspect
demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humor.

Forster differentiates between the prophet and the non-prophet.

One of them was George Eliot and the other Dostoyevsky. Forster distinguishes them by
quoting passages from both of their works. First, he quotes Eliot’s Adam Bede. Then, Forster
chooses passages from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Having finished the second reading, Forster comes to the difference between the two
authors. The first writer is a preacher, and the second a prophet.

Forster can only think of four writers to illustrate it-—Dostoevsky, Melville, D. H. Lawrence
and Emily Brontë. Having already referred to Dostoyevsky, Forster turns his sights to Herman
Melville’s Moby Dick.

It is to his conception of evil that Melville's work owes much of its strength. Evil to most
novelists is either sexual and social. In Moby Dick, evil slips into the ocean and around the
world.

Forster believes D. H. Lawrence to be the only prophetic novelist writing today… His
greatness lies far, far back, and rests, not like Dostoevsky's upon Christianity, nor like
Melville's upon a contest, but upon something aesthetic.

Wuthering Heights is a story about human beings, it contains no view of the universe.
The emotions of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw function differently to other emotions
in fiction. Instead of inhabiting the characters, they surround them like thunder cloud.

Emily Brontë was a prophetess: because what is implied is more important to her than what
is said.

 Pattern and Rhythm

We will borrow from painting first and call it the pattern. Later we will borrow from music
and call it rhythm. Unfortunately both these words are vague. Before discussing what
pattern entails, and what qualities a reader must bring to its appreciation, Forster gives two
examples of books with patterns so definite that a pictorial image sums them up.

Thais by Anatole France is the shape of an hourglass... Whereas the story appeals to our
curiosity and the plot to our intelligence, the pattern appeals to our aesthetic sense, it
causes us to see the book as a whole.

“Pattern”, which seems so rigid, is connected with atmosphere, which seems so fluid.

After Thais, Forster discusses a book that is shaped like the grand chain: Roman Pictures by
Percy Lubbock. Roman Pictures is a social comedy.

Pattern is an aesthetic aspect of the novel – it draws most of its nourishment from the plot…
Beauty is sometimes the shape of the book, the book as a whole, the unity.

Henry James’ The Ambassadors, like Thais, is the shape of an hour-glass... Everything is
planned, everything fits. The final effect is pre-arranged, dawns gradually on the reader,
and is completely successful when it comes.

The disadvantage of the pattern is it may externalize the atmosphere, spring naturally from
the plot, but it shuts the doors on life. The thoughts of most readers about pattern is
“Beautifully done, but not worth doing.”

After pattern, Forster discusses rhythm.

Rhythm in the easy sense, is illustrated by the work of Marcel Proust. Proust’s In Search of
Lost Time 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.

Forster believes that rhythm can be achieved by the writers who plan their books
beforehand, it has to depend on a local impulse when the right interval is reached.

 Conclusion
Forster says about the future of novelists that The change in their subject matter will be
enormous; they will not change.

The only question asked about the future is will the creative process itself alter? In other
words, can human nature change? All Forster does is state a possibility. If human nature
does alter, it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. If the
novelist sees himself differently he will see his characters differently, and a new system of
lightning will result.