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Aspects Novel (changes)

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Forster’s lectures at Trinity, Cambridge, spring 1927
After his last novel (P to I) written

Basic Ideas

• Definition (purposely loose, so as not to leave out anything important): fictitious prose work above 50,000 words
• Best ones not written in English, unfortunately (Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky)
  • Sees the Russian novelists as deeper than, say, Bronte, Gaskell, Meredith, Scott
• Characteristics of the Novel
  • Amorphous
  • Bounded on one side by Poetry, on the other by History
  • Allowed to be provincial (ie Hardy) (criticism isn’t)
• Seven Aspects
  • 1. Story
    • Definition: chronologically arranged sequence of events that an artist must cling to, whether they like it or not, “there is always a clock”
    • Most common element of novels: the backbone, suspense
      • Merely keeps attention
    • Which he regrets and calls “atavistic” and “primeval,” the “lowest and simplest organism” (oh dear even books degenerate) (before reading, more connex with orality, fireside stories at night)
      • Why simple? Devoid of value (he divides life into “life in time” and “life by values;” the latter distorts the former) (example: Walter Scott, who has tons of story but no passion: Forster mocks his “genteel” ways, his shallow causation, his triviality, her perfunctory characterization, his “ragged ends” that are dropped, not developed)
    • When you only have time, you just lead to death or marriage: no greatness, just the march of time
      • It has no moral: you either like it or don’t, and you get mad at people who don’t like the story you like (anti-intellectual)
    • But you can’t do without it: Gertrude Stein banished time, destroyed it, but she lost her power to create meaning, to express anything, so her texts are valueless even though the experiment was worthwhile
  • 2. People
    • Where “value” enters the picture: intelligence and imagination on the part of the reader, not mere curiosity
    • Unlike all other types of art (including poetry), obliged to deal with human beings
    • Novelists reveal hidden life (a fictitious character is one whose secret life is known), what cannot be seen by historian (thus truer than history b/c novelists know more than what evidence shows)
      • Transcends how we know people in normal daily life, by external signs, which is too approximate and leaves too much secret
    • Knows all: “If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.” 56
    • What is fictitious? Typical aspects of any real life: birth, death, sleep, food, love: are not represented in their “real” places (too little about sleep, too much about love (novelist’s preoccupation with sex is unreal and reflects the state of inspiration and writing, not real life OR b/c it’s a fabulous ending technique b/c we think it will be permanent), little about birth) b/c narrator and creator are same
      • Fictitious reality: almost a hyperreality b/c you know that the author knows everything about the character (whether or not tells it all to the reader!): this knowability is beyond the knowability of others in real life but makes the character real
      • Real reality: “haunted by a spectre” b/c we can’t know all about people: so books gives us “compensation” for this lack
    • Books give us pleasure b/c it gives us feeling we can know everything about someone, that the human race is “manageable” (which we certainly don’t think in real life)
    • Characters are “mutinous” and threaten to ruin the book, tear it to pieces
    • Flat v Round Characters
      • Flat: types, characters; feature one particular quality only; convenient for authors and readers alike b/c easily understood and never change; sure they seem unlifelike but the novel form needs them (success of Dickens suggests that they are signif); comic ones are best
      • Round: Madame Bovary, Becky Sharp, Lucy Snowe; must be “capable of surprises in a convincing way” 78 with “incalculability” of real life
  • 3. Plot
    • Plot rather than story shows how the novel should gratify memory and intelligence, not curiosity
      • Reader has to reconstruct story at every moment, trying to interpret and put together all of the moments as they read them
      • Active reading will put everything together into “aesthetically compact” bundle
    • Novel is anti-Aristotle, not classical, not like drama b/c action doesn’t by itself say anything
      • Plot requires that the characters “contribute” to action, but that’s not the whole point of the book
    • Blasts Meredith for using plot like a “series of kiosks,” mere “contrivances”
    • Plot is about CAUSALITY: why something happened, not how (“The king died, and then the queen died” is story, but “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is plot
      • It’s a mystery
    • Sometimes authors have plot at expense of character, sounds unreal: like Hardy: too much about fate: his “machine” of fate “never catches humanity in its teeth” 94
  • 4. Fantasy
    • Initial Note about Both Fantasy and Prophecy
      • Some authors have more or less of it: Charlotte Bronte and George Meredith, not so much; but Woolf and Sterne and Lawrence, yes
    • Definition: the reader knows it’s not real or probable, but author asks them to pay attention anyway; sense of mythology or gods
    • Back just to fantasy: def: invocation; implies but does not necessarily express the supernatural
      • A feel of improvisation, lack of absolute feeling (ie we could twitch back a curtain and get away from tragedy)
    • Anything from lower fairies to puns, “spotlights” on the unexpected (strange object to fasten attention onto)
    • Different from unalterable law, something other than science
    • Resistant to criticism b/c you only really get it in reading it (criticism is beside the point here); personal, a sideshow
    • Best example: Tristram Shandy, whose god is the Muddle, the book is “muddle incarnate” (facts slip away, people talk but say nothing, much activity but it doesn’t accomplish anything)
    • Devices: introducing ghosts, fairies, talking animals or plants; parody and adaptation (cf Fielding making fun of Richardson in Joseph Andrews or Shamela) (cf Ulysses, about which he says “an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed” 121)
  • 5. Prophecy
    • Def: something beyond our present abilities; a “tone of voice,” an “accent;” “his theme is the universe”
    • It is SINGING (not common sensical)
    • Could be faith in a religion or love or hate of humanity, “is not looking at the tables and chairs at all” 126
    • Best examples
      • Emily Bronte (Wuthering H)
      • D H Lawrence (Women in L)
      • Herman Melville (Moby Dick, Billy Budd)
      • Dostoevsky: the whole universe needs pity and love; beyond any individual character, who isn’t symbolic per se, nor mystic (ie, truth behind veil), but instead who “joins up” with everyone else in humanity and makes readers see world as interconnex
    • Readers need to be humble, not have a sense of humor at that moment: no mocking, no resentment
    • Removes layer of common sense from things, so things are more “vivid”
    • Ends with scary stuff: doesn’t want to accept propehecy (saying that the mind is not dignified), wants eclectics like Blake who are prophets and like prophets NOT to be “proud” of it; “pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful” 147
      • Upshot for criticism: fantasy and prophecy require different types of analytical tools to understand; now that it’s time to return to the non-prophetic and non-fantastic, he says we’ll now doubt straight criticism: “no certainty that they are the best equipment for a critic or that there is such a thing as a critical equipment”
  • 6. Pattern
    • Def: Aesthetic sense, shape of the whole (a form of unity), usually taken from the plot; a pleasure; beauty
    • Must suit the “atmosphere” or mood of the book, so not simply a geometrical affair
    • Ex: Henry James’ Ambassadors: whose pattern triumphs (other parts of book sacrificed to it, namely the reader’s interest, says Forster), for Strether and Chad “change places;” everything fits, nothing superfluous, all counts
      • “Everything is adjusted to [Strether’s] vision” 154
      • Paris is at center of book, “nothing so crude as good or evil”
      • James must narrow life down: “most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel” 160: very few characters, all of a certain type (the observer, the outsider, the foil confidante, the kind artist), who do very little little, “their clothes will not take off” 160, invisible servants, no social info or background details; the characters are “exquisite deformities;” they’re just not real, “gutted of the common stuff that fills characters” (“castrating”); no religion or philosophy
      • Note: Wells on James 162: believes that “work of art must be judged by its oneness….he doesn’t find things out. He accepts every readily and then—elaborates….Have you ever known living human beings do that?” an empty church w/light focused on altar with egg shell or dead kitten. that’s it (Wells Boon). Wells is for life rather than pattern. Forster largely agrees that pattern “shuts the doors on life and leaves the novelist doing exercises” a tyrannizing beauty 163
  • 7. Rhythm
    • Def: “repetition plus variation”
      • Defies diachrony b/c it pulls everything together “all enter the mind at once’ 168
    • Where Forster will applaud the appearance of beauty on the scene
    • “Stitched internally” where recurring bits take on lives of their own by developing rhythm
      • “almost an actor” 167
    • Should not “harden” into symbol, become boring
    • Ex: Proust, with reappearances of the Vinteuil sonata musical phrase

More Complex Theses/Method

• “Human beings have their great chance in the novel.”
  • If novelist uses “expansion,” rather than completion: liberate something rather than block it in
  • “does not every item—even the catalogue of strategies—lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?” 169
• “History develops, art stands still.” 171
• In his note about the origin of the book (lectures), he apologizes for his informal style yet notes that the novel itself is a “colloquial” (a chatty) form and that stuffy (“graver and grander”) criticism therefore cannot capture it properly.
• Rejects various methods of lit crit
  • Anti-periodizing
    • Doesn’t want to show development of novel: “all through history writers have felt more or less the same” b/c it’s all “inspiration”
      • “History develops, Art stands still.” (even the writers two hundred years from now in same room as the ones of past two hundred years
      • For example, says that people have been tricked into seeing “organic connection” between Women’s Movement and the novel
      • Is there any change in human nature, he asks at Conclusion. If anything “because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way” 172 and some novelists are trying to, and this is what is against religion, state, family institutions. But ends on doubtful note, saying that it would require us knowing everything about man, pre-historic and historic, to judge if people change and to understand devt of humanity
    • Much more about transhistorical qualities of novel
    • Everyone sits in the British Museum reading room, all writing at the same time (like a Barnes and Noble cafe)
      • When authors write, they never think about their historical position or influences, he claims (even if they intend to do so, as soon as they pick up the pen, they forget their “objectivity” and get lost in a cloud of associations, memories, passions)
    • Will lead to “pseudo-scholarship” if you try to periodize
      • Remarks on economic root of much pseudo-scholarship, essays and tests being the gateway to many a job
    • Follows T S Eliot in Sacred Wood saying that we need to understand literary tradition “beyond time”
  • Anti-thematic
    • Going by themes is even “sillier” than by chronology
  • Anti-organization
    • Mocks the scholar who shows 9 types of weather in books
    • Refuses to use “principles” or a “system” because the novel concerns “the human heart, man-to-man business” for “the novel is sogged with humanity” 24
  • What the scholar must really do is read the novels themselves
• Right in the center of fiction writing is the goal of being convincing: author has to make reader accept his words and story 79
  • Not as important as point of view, which he says critics make too much noise about
  • What he cares about with point of view is authors “bouncing” you from one kind of viewpoint to another (for example being more omniscient in one chapter than in another; or going from omniscient to what he calls “dramatic” which is focalization) (his favorite example Bleak House: first chapter third-person omniscient, second chapter less so, third chapter in Esther’s head)
    • Bouncing back and forth resembles the “shimmering” way you perceive in real life (sometimes you “are more stupid” than at other times); intermittence = variety, colors
• Can’t be too preachy about your method, can’t be too show-offily self reflexive b/c then you just get people thinking about the author’s mind, whereas they should care about characters (he critiques Gide’s Faux monnayeurs
  • Such attempts are only “interesting” rather than emotionally deep
• No meta-commentary from writer about characters
  • Example: When narrator drops back to judge a character for the reader’s benefit
    • Will result in “drop” in emotional atmosphere, less interest from reader
  • Are allowed to give general commentary about state or world or espouse philosophical viewpoint: just don’t have “bar-parlour chattiness” about the character
  • He’s not against ALL kinds of meta-commentary, unlike many modernists, who try to make narrator disappear altogether
• Wells and Dickens: both “get an effect by cataloguing details” (describes two funeral scenes)
• Neat quote from Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” in Monday or Tuesday
• Food is “double-faced commodity” in that links you to birth and death, but also has aesthetic component to it 49
• Novelist’s Main Job: there are two parts of novels, the human and the non-human, and the novelist must BALANCE them somehow
• Danger of criticism: like a bird flying, with its shadow so far below, the novels can run away from the criticism: the critic stops referring to what’s actually been read
  • “When we try to translate truth out of one sphere into another, whether from life into books or from books into lectures…it goes wrong” 106
• Prophetic authors can seem to busy themselves with details, with cataloguing petty things: Lawrence’s landscapes, Melville’s whale products, which are a “form of excitement” that resemble child sitting down absorbed in something between more active playing 126
  • Gives them “roughness of surface”
  • Maybe the meet up w/my catalog stuff?