Richard L. W.

Clarke LITS2306 Notes 08B

E. M. FORSTER, ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL (1927)

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. London: Edward Arnold, 1927.
Chapter 2 The Story
Here, Forster begins by claiming that everyone agrees that the fundamental aspect of the
novel is its storytelling aspect (33). The novel tells a story (34). This, rather than other
lofty functions such as perception of the truth (34), is the fundamental aspect without
which it could not exist (34). It runs like a backbone or may I say a tapeworm, for its
beginning and end are arbitrary (34). It is immensely old (34), going back to at least
neolithic times (34). He hazards a guess that Neanderthal man listened to stories (34)
and was only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? (34). We all want to
know what happened next (35), we are all motivated by primeval curiosity (35). Forster
accordingly defines story as a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence dinner
coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on (35). Its only
merit (35) is that of making the audience want to know what happens next (35). Though
it is the lowest and simplest of literary organisms (35), it is the highest common factor
common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels (35). When we isolate the
story . . . from the nobler aspects through which it moves, and hold it out on the forceps
wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time it presents an appearance that is both
unlovely and dull (35-36). Forsters comparison of the story with a lowly parasite found in
a higher organism is explicit.
Distinguishing between the role played in our [d]aily life (36) between what he calls
time sense (36) and something else in life besides time . . . which may conveniently be
called value, something which is measured not by minutes or hours, but by intensity (36).
The latter divides the past . . . into a few notable pinnacles (36) and turns the future (36)
into sometimes a wall, sometimes a cloud, sometimes a sun, but never a chronological chart
(36). Neither memory nor anticipation is much interested in Father Time (36). Daily life,
Forster argues, is practically composed of two lives the life in time and the life by values
(36) for which reason our conduct reveals a double allegiance (36). What the story does
is to narrate the life in time (36), whereas what the entire novel does . . . is to include the
life by values as well (36) by means of devices hereafter to be examined (36). In the
novel, allegiance to time is imperative: no novel could be written without it (37). Though
in daily life we may do our best to ignore time and though mystics may tell us that time is an
illusion, it is impossible for the novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel (37).
Though the author may dislike his clock (37) and may try to circumvent time in some way
by means of many legitimate devices (37), none of them contravene our thesis: the basis
of a novel is a story, and a story is a narrative of events arranged in a time sequence (3738). Forster stresses at this point that a story . . . is not the same as plot. It may form the
basis of one, but the plot is an organism of a higher type (38).
Over pp. 39-47, Forster engages in what the Modernists called practical criticism, that
is, he seeks to apply the preceding theoretical discussion to the novelist Walter Scott and, in
particular, his The Antiquary, Johann David Wyss The Swiss Family Robinson, Arnold Bennets
The Old Wives Tale, Tolstoys War and Peace. He concludes by offering a word . . . about the
story as the repository of a voice (47). Voice is the aspect of the novelists work which asks
to be read out loud, which appeals not to the eye, like most prose, but to the ear; having
indeed this much in common with oratory (47). The eye . . . can easily gather up the
sounds of a paragraph or dialogue (47), can telescope them up so that we can get them
quicker than we should do if they were recited, just as some people can look through a

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 08B

musical score quicker than it can be rapped out on the piano (47). However, the eye is not
equally quick at catching a voice (47). We lose something (47) when it is not read aloud
(47). This is because the story, besides saying one thing after another, adds something
because of its connection with a voice (47). It does not add much. It does not give us
anything as important as the authors personality (47) which is conveyed through nobler
agencies, such as the characters or the plot or his comments on life (47). Rather, what the
story does is transform us from readers into listeners, to whom a voice speaks (47), for
example, that of the tribal narrator, squatting in the middle of the cave (47). This is why,
Forster argues, 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 (48).
The other life the life by value presses against the novel from all sides, . . . ready
to fill and indeed distort it, offering it people, plots, fantasies, views of the universe, anything
except this constant and then . . . and then (48). The life in time is so obviously base and
inferior that the question naturally occurs: cannot the novelist abolish it from his work . . .?
(48). This is, Forster argues, what Gertrude Stein and, before her, Emily Bronte, Thomas
Sterne, and Marcel Proust attempted to do, in order to emancipate fiction from the tyranny
of time and to express in it the life by values only (48-49). However, all such attempts to
abolish . . . this sequence in chronology (49) are a disaster because as soon as fiction is
completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at all (49). This is because such
writers cannot do it without abolishing the sequence between the sentences (49), and in
turn the order of the words in the sentences (49), which in its turn entails the abolition of
the order of the letters or sounds in the words (49). The reality is that 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 (49).
Chapter 3 People
Here, Forster turns his attention away from the story and towards the actors (51). Interest
turns from what happened next (51) to to whom did it happen (51). A new emphasis
(51) enters the novelists voice (51): emphasis upon value (51).
Forster first considers the relation of characters (52) to actual life (52).
He
wonders about the difference between people in a novel and people like the novelist or like
you, or like me (52). Because the novelist is a human, there is an affinity between him and
his subject-matter (52). Historians, painters, sculptors, musicians, poets are linked . . . less
intimately (52) to the human subject. By contrast, the novelist makes up a number of
word-masses . . ., gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and cause
them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently. These
word-masses are his characters (52). Their nature is conditioned by his guesses about other
people, and himself (52). If a fictional character is like an identifiable person such as Queen
Victoria, the novel becomes a memoir (52), which is history (52) and is based on
evidence (52). Though a novel is also based on evidence, this is modified by the
temperament of the novelist (52-53), an unknown quantity (53) which always modifies
the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely (53). The historian also is
concerned with characterisation; he too deals with actions, and with the characters of men
only so far as he can deduce them from their actions (53) but he can only know of its
existence when it shows on the surface (53). The hidden life (53) is available to the
historian only via its external signs (53). Where these are missing, the hidden life remains
hidden. However, it is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to
tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who
is not the Queen Victoria of history (53). Forster cites in this regard the views of a French

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 08B

critic named Alain expressed in his Systme des beaux arts to the effect that all that is
observable in man that is to say his actions and such as of his spiritual existence as can be
deduced from his actions falls into the domain of history (53-54). The novel, rather, exists
to express (54) another side of human nature (54): mans romanceful or romantic side
(54), that is, the pure passions, that is to say the dreams, joys, sorrows and selfcommunings which politeness or shame prevent him from mentioning (54). The historian
records whereas the novelist creates (54). In Forsters view, this points to a
fundamental difference between people in daily life and people in books. 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 the basis for society and even for
intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely, 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. . . . (54)
In short, character do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual
secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe. (54-55)
Forster then states the five main facts in human life (55), birth, food, sleep, live and
death (55) with which a novelist must contend. The crucial question for Forster is, does the
novelist tend to reproduce them accurately or does he tend to exaggerate, minimise, ignore
(55) these factors; does he tend to exhibit his characters going through processes which are
not the same through you and I go, though they bear the same names? (55). Forster
addresses birth and death first, arguing that we move between two darknesses (55) in the
sense that we cannot remember (55) our birth even as we do not kn ow what death is like.
Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural (55) and neither the baby nor the corpse
can enlighten us (55). The novelist, then, must think of people as starting life with an
experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
These are the creatures whom the novelist proposes to introduce as characters into books
(55). Then Forster considers how the novelist will address a humans need for food, the
process of putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face (56). Forster considers
next how the novelist treats the need for sleep which takes up about a third of our time (5657) and about which little is known and which seems to us after leaving it to have been a
caricature of this world and partly a revelation (57). Last but not least, Forster considers the
treatment of sex and its relationship to other emotions (57) such as affection, friendship,
patriotism, mysticism (57). Taken together these constitute, in Forsters view, the human
make-up or part of it (58).
Made up like this himself, the novelist takes his pen in hand . . . and tries to create
characters (58). The novelist whose main passion is human beings . . . will sacrifice a great
deal to their convenience story, plot, form, incidental beauty (58). Wondering in what
senses do the nations of fiction differ from those of the earth (59), Forster asserts that
though they have nothing in common in the scientific sense (59), they tend to behave
along the same lines (59). Few, if any authors, have tried to use the facts of birth (59) or
to work back towards the psychology of the babys mind (59). By contrast, in the case of
death, the doors of that darkness lie open to him and he can even follow his characters
through it (60). Food is not required physiologically (60) by characters and its function is
mainly social (60). Likewise, sleep is treated in a perfunctory (61) manner. By contrast,
how enormously love bulks in a novel (61) to the point where it is monotonous (61). The
predominance of love in novels (62), he argues, is partly due to the fact that among people
who have plenty of leisure (62), like the novelist, sex and love are often on the mind, and
partly because love ends a book conveniently (62): the marriage (63) with which novels

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 08B

often end offer an illusion of permanence (63) and we do not object because we lend them
our dreams (63).
Homo Fictus (63), Forster argues, is more elusive than his cousin (63), Homo
Sapiens (63). It is difficult to generalise because he is created in the minds of hundreds of
different novelists (63) but one can say a little about him. He is generally born off, he is
capable of dying on, he wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with human
relationships (63). Perhaps most importantly, we can know more about him than we can
know about our fellow creatures (63) and this because his creator and narrator are one
(63). From pp. 63-69, Forster applies these high speculations (63) to Daniel Defoes Moll
Flanders in which [n]othing matters but the heroine (68). It is a novel in which character
is everything (68). In the novel, or perhaps some novels, characterisation trumps plot.
Forster concludes his discussion of the novel by considering the realism of the lead
character. Forster considers the usual reply, . . . the aesthetic reply, to the effect that the
novel is a work of art, with its own laws, which are not those of daily life, and that a character
in a novel is real when it lives in accordance with such laws (69). The barrier of art divides
(69) fictional characters from us. They are real not because they are like ourselves (though
they may be like us) but because they are convincing (69). However, Forster argues that we
want a reply that is less aesthetic and more psychological (69). What separates them from
us is that a character like Moll Flanders belongs to a world where the secret life is visible
(69), to a world where the narrator and the creator are one (70). A character in a book 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 (70). This is not
possible in real life for human intercourse (70) is haunted by a spectre (70): 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
(70). By contrast, in the novel we can know people perfectly (70) and derive therefrom a
compensation for their dimness in life (70). In this direction fiction is truer than history,
because it goes beyond the evidence (70). Fictional characters are people whose secret lives
are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secrete lives are invisible (70). Novels
accordingly provide us with solace (71) because they suggest a more comprehensible and
thus a more manageable human race (71) and give us the illusion of perspicacity and of
power (71).
Chapter 4 People (Continued)
Here, Forster turns from what he terms transplantation (73) (i.e. Whether people could be
taken out of life and put into a book [73], and vice versa, as well as whether we can in daily
life, understand each other [73]) to acclimatisation (73), that is, the characters in their
relation to other aspects of the novel; to a plot, a moral, their fellow characters, atmosphere,
etc. (73). It follows from this that one cannot expect them to coincide as a whole with daily
life, only to parallel it (73). The characters in a Jane Austen novel are bound by a hundred
threads (73) to their environment because her characters are inter-dependent (73) and
because they cannot be separated from the plot of her novels which is a closely woven fabric
from nothing can be removed (74).
The novelist, Forster argues, must juggle a mixed lot of ingredients (74), including
the story and the human beings (74) about whom he writes and in relation to whom he must
balance the life by values (74) with the life in time (74). The characters are often full of
the spirit of mutiny (74) in that they try to live their own lives and are consequently often
engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book (74): they are Creations inside a

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 08B

creation and often inharmonious towards it (74). If given too much freedom, they may kick
the book to pieces (74), whereas if kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by
dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay (74). Forster intends to examine two devices by
which the novelist seeks to solve these difficulties: first, the use of different kinds of
characters (75) and, second, the device connected with point of view (75).
Forster claims famously that we may divide characters into flat and round (75). The
former, flat characters, are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures (75) and,
in their purest form, they are constructed around a single idea or quality (75). Their great
advantage (76) is that they are easily recognised (76) by the readers emotional eye (76)
and easily remembered . . . afterwards (77). They are not changed by circumstances (77)
through which they move unaffected. They persist even after the books in which they are
found decay (77). Most critics have very little patience with such renderings of human
nature (77) and often censure novelists like Charles Dickens for including flat characters such
as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield. Forster defends Dickens characterisation, arguing that
nearly all can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human
depth (79). Though he does use types and caricatures, people whom we recognise the
instant they re-enter (79), he also achieves . . . a vision of humanity that is not shallow
(79). Last but not least, Forster points out that flat characters are best when they are comic.
A serious or tragic flat character is apt to be a bore (80).
Forster then turns his attention to round characters. Rather than offer a definition,
Forster begins by discussing Jane Austens characters in Mansfield Park and other novels.
Austen, he argues, is a miniaturist (82) capable of painting on a square of ivory (82). But
her characters though smaller (82) than Dickens are more highly organised (82). All her
characters are round or capable of rotundity (82) and are ready for an extended life (83).
The
test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing
way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat
pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it life within the
pages of a book. And by using it sometimes alone, more often in combination
with the other kind [flat characters], the novelist achieves his task of
acclimatisation. . . . (85)
It is in this way that the novelist harmonises the human race with the other aspects of his
work (85).
Forster then turns his attention to the point of view from which the story is told (85).
Forster summarises Percy Lubbocks view in The Craft of Fiction that the novelist
can either describe the characters from outside, as an impartial or partial
onlooker; or he can assume omniscience and describe them from within; or he
can place himself in the position of one of them and affect to be in the dark as
to the motives of the rest; or there are certain intermediate attitudes. (85-86)
Those who follow (86) Lubbock may very well lay a sure foundation for the aesthetics of
fiction (86) but Forster states that he himself cannot make any such promise (86) in his
own ramshackly survey (86). For Forster, the whole intricate question of method resolves
itself not into formulae but into the power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting
what he says (86). This is a power which Mr. Lubbock admits and admires, but locates at
the edge of the problem instead of at the centre (86). Forster wants to put it plumb in the
centre (86). Dickens, for example, may evince shiftings of the viewpoint (87) from
omniscience to partial omniscience to dramatised point of view but he bounces us (87) all
the same. For Forster, though point of view certainly is peculiar to the novel (87), it has
been rather over-stressed (87) and is not so important as a proper mixture of characters
(87). To buttress his point, Forster then considers Andr Gides Les Faux Monnayeurs and

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 08B

Tolstoys War and Peace. He argues that a novelist can shift his view-point if it comes off
(87). This power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view-point is a
symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge (88) is, in Forsters view, one of the great
advantages of the novel-form (88) and has a parallel in our perception of life (88) in that
we are stupider at some times than others; we can enter into peoples minds occasionally but
not always (88). This intermittence lends in the long run variety and colour to the
experience we receive (88). A novelist should only be censured (88) if we catch them at
it (88), that is, if he takes the reader into his confidence about his characters (88) as, for
example, if he were to say that character A has a heart of gold (89) or that he prefers A to
B. Intimacy is gained but at the expense of illusion (89). Authorial interventions such as
one reads in Fielding or Thackeray is nothing more than bar-parlour chattiness (89) and is
harmful (89), if not downright dangerous (88), to a novel. What Forster terms
confidences (89) about the characters are to be differentiated from taking your reader into
your confidence about the universe (89), that is, by generalising about the conditions under
which he thinks life is carried on (89), because the former beckons the reader away from
the people to an examination of the novelists mind (89).
Chapter 5 The Plot
Here, having discussed characterisation in chapters 4 and 5, Forster begins by referring to
Aristotles view that, in tragedies at least, the qualities of a character are less important than
what they do for it is the actions of people which lead to either good or bad fortune. Forster
disagrees with Aristotle, contending 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 (91).
Aristotles comments may apply to the drama (91), he argues, but not to the novel. This
is because the
speciality of the novel is that the writer can talk about his characters as well as
through them or can arrange for us to listen when they talk to themselves. He
has access to self-communings, and from that level he can descend even
deeper and peer into the subconscious. A man does not talk to himself quite
truly not even to himself; the happiness or the misery that he secretly feels
proceed from causes that he cannot quite explain, because as soon as he raises
them to the level of the explicable they lose their native quality. (92)
This is where the novelist has real pull (92): he can show the subconscious short-circuiting
straight into action (92), or in its relation to soliloquy (92). He commands all the secret
life (92). Many have criticised the novelist on this score:
How did the write know that? it is sometimes said. Whats his standpoint?
He is not being consistent, hes shifting his point of view from the limited to the
omniscient, and now hes edging back again. (92)
But, in Forsters view, all this is unimportant and smacks of the law-courts. Rather, all that
matters to the reader is whether the shifting of attitude and the secret life are convincing
(92).
Given this enlargement of human nature (92) in the novel, Forster wonders what
is going to become of the plot? (92). In most literary works there are two elements: human
individuals . . . and the element vaguely called art (92). Art includes story (93), which is
a very low form (92-93) discussed earlier, the chopped-off length of the tape-worm of time
(93). It also includes, however, a much higher aspect: the plot (93). Plot is confronted not
by human beings more or less cut to its requirements (93) but, rather, finds them
enormous, shadowy, and intractable, and three-quarters hidden like an iceberg (93). It
attempts to persuade these unwieldy creatures (93)of the advantages of the triple process

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 08B

of complication, crisis, and solution (93) advocated by Aristotle. When the characters rise
and comply (93), the result is a novel that should have been a play (93). The
individualism (93) inherent in characters which makes them want to sit apart and brood
(93) causes certain limits (93) to be overstepped (93): characters must not brood too
long, they must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides (93).
Rather, this lack of public spirit (93) must be transcended and they must contribute, or
higher interests will be jeopardised (93).
At this point, Forster distinguishes plot from story by defining the former as a
narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. The king died and then
the queen died, is a story. The king died and then the queen died of grief, is
a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows
it. (93)
Another kind of plot is possible:
The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through
grief at the death of the king. This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form
capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far
away from the story as its limitations allow. (93-94)
In the case of the story, we say and then? (94), while in the case of the plot, we ask
why? (94). The fundamental difference (94) between these two aspects of the novel (94)
is that story can only supply curiosity (94), whereas plot demands intelligence and memory
also (94).
Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties (94), Forster argues, and is
demonstrated mainly by inquisitive (94) people. It does not take us far into the novel
only as far as the story (94). By contrast, plot demands intelligence on the part of the reader
to note each new fact (95) from two points of view: isolated, and related to the other facts
that he has read on previous pages (95). The element of surprise or mystery (95) is crucial
to plot: it occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a pocket in time
(95) which occurs both crudely, as in Why did the queen die? (95) and more subtly in halfexplained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns pages ahead (95).
Mystery is essential to plot, and cannot be appreciated without intelligence (95). While part
of the mind must be left behind, brooding (95), the curious (95) part of the mind goes
marching on (95) from and then (95) to and then (95).
Intelligence is closely connected (95) to memory (95) for unless we remember we
cannot understand (95). The plot-maker expects us to remember (95) while we in turn
expect him to leave no loose ends (95). Every action or word in a plot ought to count
(95): over it, as it unfolds, will hover the memory of the reader (that dull glow of the mind
of which intelligence is the bright advancing edge (95-96) and will constantly rearrange and
reconsider, seeing new clues, new chains of cause and effect (96). The final sense (96) will
not be of clues or chains, but of something aesthetically compact (96), something not
shown by the author straight away (96): if he had, it would never have become beautiful
(96). While a novelist should never aim (96) at beauty, he fails if he does not achieve it
(96).
In the pages that follows, Forster discusses several writers who are particularly adept
at plot. From pp. 96-100, he mainly discusses the work of George Meredith (and, briefly,
Charlotte Brontes). From pp. 100-102, he discusses Thomas Hardys work. Forster, finally,
analyses over the course of pp. 104-109 Andr Gides Les Faux Monnayeurs where, he argues,
there is carried out a violent onslaught on the plot as we have defined it, and a constructive
effort to put something (104) in its place is made. His work will be enjoyed, he contends,
by those who weary of the tyranny by the plot and of its alternative, tyranny by characters
(109).