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ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL EM Forster Books

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ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL EM Forster Books

This must have been a very fun romp when Forster unveiled it as a series of lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, nine years after the First World War ended and eleven before the Second one started. In illustrating examples of specific writing techniques Forster refers to easily fifty books, authors, and characters (in 175 pages, mind you). When would the young men in his audience have had the opportunity to acquaint themselves with a fraction of them? How many would still have a place set for them at the family table twenty years hence? This slender volume is a piece of history itself; more a running critique of two hundred years of British literature than it is a manual of craft. God how I’d like to see the attendance sheet for those lectures to see how many of his students profited from Forster’s observations and are known today.

What will you learn from this book? For one you will learn Forster’s distinction between “story” and “plot.” FYI, stories read as follows: “then this, then this, then this…” Plot reads as follows: “This caused this, which caused this.” Okay, that’s two chapters. Then we have two aspects of character. The first is what we now call the character’s interior life, and Forster calls his “secret life.” This is something known to the author and revealed as organically and realistically as possible in order to seduce the reader into the character’s mind and to intimately share his understanding of things. The second aspect of character is a Forster neologism, round versus flat characters. In a nutshell, flat characters are predictable and round characters surprise us. This perception of characters being more interesting to readers because of their dimensionality was an original insight of Forster’s.

Frankly, dear reader, (a familiarity Forster strongly discourages) the chapters on fantasy and prophesy may be skipped. He was after all being paid for a series of lectures and though he’d covered the topic in five chapters, he recognized the billing opportunity of carrying on for another four. In fairness the last is a three and a half page conclusion. It basically says that we may learn much from past masters but only creative new insights, new characters, and new craft will delight tomorrow’s readers. Future readers, that would be us, will have higher expectations.


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ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL EM Forster Books Reviews

E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel is a collection of lectures he held at Trinity College in 1927. This book comprises of the author’s note, an introduction, a chapter on the story, two on characters, one on plot, fantasy, prophecy, patterns and rhythm and a conclusion.

In the Introduction, Forster defines the novel and its length, then, he compares famous English novels with masterpieces of French and Russian literature and states that “No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy” because “No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.” (p. 7)

Through the image of all the novelists writing in the same room, at the same table, Forster wants to demonstrate that each great novel is valuable due to its literary merits and not by scholarly periodisation. By pairing writers from different time periods and comparing their works, Forster shows the similarities between them even when more than a century separates the novels from one another. For example, he pairs Samuel Richardson with Henry James, H.G. Wells with Charles Dickens or Laurence Stern with Virginia Woolf. Through these examples, Forster illustrates that chronology is not that important.

In the first chapter of the book, we learn that the basis of every novel is the story because our curiosity to know what happens next is ingrained in our being from prehistoric times; The suspense keeps the listeners attentive and sometimes story-telling may save lives if we think about Scheherazade’s stories which delayed her fate. Though story and plot seem similar, they are actually not and Forster explains why is it so in the fourth chapter.

The second and third chapter revolve around characters. Unlike real people who have private thoughts and secrets, characters’ hidden side can be revealed for a better understanding of their actions, if the author chooses to do so. However, some of the five basic elements of ordinary life (birth, food, sleep, love and death) rarely appear in novels because a work of fiction has its own set of rules and eating or sleeping may not be relevant to the story.

Later on, Forster makes an important distinction between flat and round characters. Flat characters are one-dimensional, easy to recognise and don’t surprise the reader. Well written flat characters appear in Dickens’s novels and Forster considers Pip and David Copperfield as being flat characters who attempt to become round. On the opposite side of the spectrum are the round characters who grow throughout the novel and surprise the reader. Round characters appear in Jane Austen’s novels and Forster praises her for being a “miniaturist” because all her characters are rounded and can adapt to a more complex plot. Other round characters populate all of Tolstoy’s and Dostoyevsky’s novels.

The fourth chapter focuses on the plot, which is “also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.” (p. 86) The story only fulfils the reader’s curiosity, while the plot forces them to use their intellect and memory to put together each piece of the puzzle the writer provides. The intelligent or ideal reader doesn’t expect to understand everything at once, they have the patience to read until the end to discover the mystery, which is essential to the plot.

The following chapters are about fantasy and prophecy. For Forster, fantastic stories have supernatural elements, whether they are obvious or subtle. Here, he considers fantastic the stories that deal with the unfamiliar or the uncanny, which wouldn’t make sense in real life. Prophecy, on the other hand, is linked to the tone of a novel that sends powerful and profound messages of faith, love, humanity and so on. The best examples of prophetic writers are Dostoevsky, Melville, Emily Bronte and D. H. Lawrence.

The last two aspects of the novel are pattern and rhythm which are strongly linked to the plot. The pattern has an aesthetic function in the novel, while. rhythm is a recurring phrase or theme, which, according to Forster, is similar to a motif in a symphony.

Though the book is a bit dry and Forster talks in metaphors, it was an informative read for me because I recalled what I learned in college about the novel and its essential building blocks. I see the importance of reading Forster’s lectures if someone studies literature or the craft of writing.
I gave this book five stars, because although it was really a series of lectures, it is easy to read. The information is timeless concerning what the novel is. It keeps us grounded when we encounter authors trying to do too much that is new. It also helps to understand why the classics are indeed classics. The most helpful thing he mentions is that we need to take all the novelists of the past two hundred years and place them in one room as they write. This sets aside the time in which they are writing and emphasizes what they are telling us about human nature. Read the book!
This must have been a very fun romp when Forster unveiled it as a series of lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, nine years after the First World War ended and eleven before the Second one started. In illustrating examples of specific writing techniques Forster refers to easily fifty books, authors, and characters (in 175 pages, mind you). When would the young men in his audience have had the opportunity to acquaint themselves with a fraction of them? How many would still have a place set for them at the family table twenty years hence? This slender volume is a piece of history itself; more a running critique of two hundred years of British literature than it is a manual of craft. God how I’d like to see the attendance sheet for those lectures to see how many of his students profited from Forster’s observations and are known today.

What will you learn from this book? For one you will learn Forster’s distinction between “story” and “plot.” FYI, stories read as follows “then this, then this, then this…” Plot reads as follows “This caused this, which caused this.” Okay, that’s two chapters. Then we have two aspects of character. The first is what we now call the character’s interior life, and Forster calls his “secret life.” This is something known to the author and revealed as organically and realistically as possible in order to seduce the reader into the character’s mind and to intimately share his understanding of things. The second aspect of character is a Forster neologism, round versus flat characters. In a nutshell, flat characters are predictable and round characters surprise us. This perception of characters being more interesting to readers because of their dimensionality was an original insight of Forster’s.

Frankly, dear reader, (a familiarity Forster strongly discourages) the chapters on fantasy and prophesy may be skipped. He was after all being paid for a series of lectures and though he’d covered the topic in five chapters, he recognized the billing opportunity of carrying on for another four. In fairness the last is a three and a half page conclusion. It basically says that we may learn much from past masters but only creative new insights, new characters, and new craft will delight tomorrow’s readers. Future readers, that would be us, will have higher expectations.